Climax as Orgasm: On Debussy’s ‘L’isle Joyeuse’

Esteban Buch

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Esteban Buch. Climax as Orgasm: On Debussy’s ‘L’isle Joyeuse’. Music and Letters, Oxford Univer-
sity Press (OUP), 2019, 100 (1), pp.24-60. �10.1093/ml/gcz001�. �hal-02954014�

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Esteban Buch, ‘Climax as Orgasm: On Debussy’s “L’isle Joyeuse”’, Music and Letters
100/1 (February 2019), p. 24-60.

Climax as Orgasm:
On Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse

This article discusses the relationship of musical climax and orgasm by

considering the case of L’isle joyeuse, a piano piece that Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
began in 1903, completing it in the Summer of 1904 soon after starting a sentimental
relationship with Emma Bardac, née Moyse (1862-1934), his second wife and the
mother of his daughter Claude-Emma, alias ‘Chouchou’ (1905-1919). By exploring the
genesis of the piece, I suggest that the creative process started as the pursuit of a
solitary exotic male fantasy, culminating in Debussy’s sexual encounter with Emma
and leading the composer to inscribe their shared experience in the final, revised form
of the piece.
The erotic component of the piece has been stressed by, among others, Michael
Klein, who speaks of ‘undeniable sexual energy’ close to the point where, he says, ‘the
music reaches orgasm.’1 This description of the final climax seems justified and indeed
throws new light on the ways in which music and sexuality are intertwined in the
individuals’ experience, including, potentially, the listener’s. Now, while Klein’s
insights into the piece are stimulating, he does not justify the use of the word orgasm,
which he takes only as a hyperbolic substitute for climax. By exploring the role of
music in the actual life of the actors, this article makes a case for orgasm being more
than a literary metaphor.
At a theoretical level, an ecological approach to music perception suggests that
music can afford sexual behaviour and representations in particular situations. I
privilege here a discussion of analogies between climax and orgasm, not because I
think that orgasm is the essence and purpose of sexual pleasure, as generally thought,
but rather because it is well suited for a systematic analysis of the formal relationships
between sex and music.2

1
Michael Klein, ‘Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 31/3
(2007), 28-52 at 36.
2
For a critique of the ‘orgasm imperative’ see Hannah Frith, Orgasmic Bodies. The Orgasm in
Contemporary Western Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); André Béjin and Michaël Pollak,

1
 Of course, the very nature of sexual intimacy makes it very difficult, indeed
almost impossible, to reconstruct such an experience with any degree of certainty and
detail. The only thing about the Debussys’ sexual life that is absolutely beyond doubt,
is the fact that a sexual encounter occurred in the winter of 1905, nine months before
the birth of Chouchou in October. Nevertheless, such an empirical exploration is called
for, despite many lacunae and conjectures. Conjectures are not methodological
weaknesses or deviances, but fundamentals of any historiographical operation.3 And
this is all the more so when dealing with certain kinds of human activity and a
particular kind of art, namely sexuality and music, whose epistemologies are defined
by secrecy and hermeneutical uncertainty.
Such an interdisciplinary approach, based on musicological, sexological,
narratological and historical literature, might allow us to go beyond a number of
current assumptions about the role of sex in artistic creation. The Freudian concept of
sublimation, implying that the powerful excitations from individual sources of
sexuality are discharged and utilized in other spheres, has become a paradigm for
explaining the role of the libido in artistic creation.4 Yet, commentators have often
found this idea unsatisfactory. For Paul Ricoeur, it is an ‘empty concept’ that fails to
make intelligible the dialectics ‘of the desire and the Other of desire’.5 For Georges
Didi-Huberman, the notion that art transforms instinctual energies into beauty and
culture, thus calming down unsatisfied desires, does not make it possible ‘to interpret,
and even simply to describe, cultural productions, those fatally impure objects’
marked, in his view, by destruction and discontent (Unbehagen).6 Especially disturbing,
for our methodology, is the difficulty of relating the hypothesis of sublimation to
actual biographical traces beyond the global assumption that some kind of ‘libidinal
economy’ is at work.7
By renouncing general explanations in favour of a case-by-case approach, a
micro-historical description of sexual experiences and their relation to the creative
process might better honour Freud’s basic intuition about art, namely that sexual

‘La rationalisation de la sexualité’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Nouvelle série Vol. 62 (1977),
105-125.
3
Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, History
Workshop Journal, No. 9 (Spring, 1980), 5-36; Simon T. Kaye, ‘Challenging Certainty: The Utility and
History of Counterfactualism’, History and Theory, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Feb., 2010), 38-57.
4
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sex (New York and Washington: Nervous and Mental
Disease Publishing Co., 1920) (French ed. 189).
5
Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 512.
6
Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Postface: des images et des maux’. Invention de l’hystérie (Paris: Macula,
2012), 392.
7
Jean-François Lyotard, Économie libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

2
drives are important for artistic creativity, and that access to the artist’s intimacy is the
proper way to understand how and why. This genetic approach implies from the start
a parting of company with Klein, whose hermeneutics of the musical work disregards
biographical materials altogether; indeed, he never mentions sketches nor other traces
of the creative process, and the mere biographical contextualization of his analysis to
the effect that ‘Debussy composed L’isle joyeuse in the summer of 1904 while on an
extramarital holiday on the island of Jersey with Emma Bardac’8 is actually misleading.
Now, the assumption that sex does matter for art has never gone without
resistance. This often goes in the name of idealistic or moralistic conceptions of artistic
creativity. François Lesure, the great biographer of the composer, thought it vain ‘to
try to explain Debussy’s oeuvre by his sentimental life (expériences amoureuses).’9 This
article will seek to demonstrate quite the opposite, and to connect these insights with
broader biographical issues. Debussy’s marriage with Emma Bardac in 1908, a 45-year-
old woman he first met as the mother of a pupil, Raoul Bardac, has often been
described as resulting from social ambition rather than from love and desire. Of
course, social ambition can sometimes also fuel desire, but this is the contrary of
discarding desire altogether. Mary Garden, a friend and a favourite performer of
Debussy’s music (she was the first Mélisande), wrote laconically in her notebooks: ‘His
first wife was young and poor. His second was old and rich.’10 A distorted vision of
his private life, including hostile allusions to Emma’s Jewish origin, emerged in 1904
shortly after the beginning of their initially adulterous relationship at a time when
Claude was married to Lilly Texier and Emma to Sigismond Bardac.11
Public opinion at the beginning of the last century was opposed such a
relationship, partly as a matter of age. In this ‘golden age of male adultery’, four out
of five mistresses were younger than deceived wives, who were in turn mostly
younger than her adulterous husbands; and fewer than one out of three women
involved in adulterous relationships were forty years old or more. Anne-Marie Sohn
points out that ‘psychologically, though not legally, adultery stopped being a crime
between 1880 and 1900.’12 From a legal point of view, even though divorce was
reinstated in France in 1884, it was not until December 1904 that the law allowed

8
Klein, ‘Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse’, 32.
9
François Lesure, Claude Debussy. Biographie critique (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 12.
10
Quoted in Gillian Opstad, Debussy’s Mélisande: The Lives of Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden and Maggie
Teyte (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), 121.
11
See Myriam Chimènes, Mécènes et musiciens. Du salon au concert à Paris sous la IIIe République (Paris:
Fayard, 2004), 195.
12
Anne-Marie Sohn, ‘The Golden Age of Male Adultery: The Third Republic’, Journal of Social History,
Vol. 28, No. 3 (Spring, 1995), 469-490, 473 and 483.

3
adulterous lovers to remarry, something that in their case would have to wait until
January 1908. Claude Debussy’s and Emma Bardac’s liaison was thus not only a
violation of the laws of marriage, but also a transgression of the norms of adultery.
The idea that a woman of his own age could not be the object of desire of the
composer appeared as early as October 1904, when news of their liaison distressed
Lilly to the point that she attempted suicide. The writer Pierre Louÿs who, like other
friends outraged by Claude’s abandonment of his first wife, took Lilly’s side, writing
to his brother:
‘The husband left with a forty-something years old Jewish woman, Mme
S. Bardac, I think you know Bardac, at least he came to your office. Very
used to his wife’s escapades, he smiles to whoever seeks news about her:
“She has just seduced the last fashionable musician, but I’m the one
who’s got the money. She will come back to me”.’13

Louÿs was a well-known anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard and also a libertine fond of
young girls, a recurrent theme of his literary work.14 His entire vision of life and society
went against acknowledging the charms of a 42 -year old Jewish woman.
On November 4, news of Lilly’s tragic and spectacular suicide attempt (by
shooting herself in the stomach) appeared in several newspapers. No names were
given, but the characters of this fait divers were not hard to recognize. Le Figaro speaks
of ‘Mme D…, a very pretty young woman, married to a very distinguished music
composer’, namely ‘M. D…’.15 In these texts, Lilly’s feminine charms are systematically
underlined and Emma’s systematically ignored.16 The fact that many of Debussy’s
friends, with or without ideological motivations, disapproved of his liaison with
Emma Bardac to the point of total rupture, was a cause of deep distress for him. The
long conflict with Lilly, eventually including a legal obligation to pay her pension, did
not help to calm things down. And not only the composer’s inner and musical circles,
but also Emma’s family reacted negatively. Her uncle, the influential financier Daniel
Iffla Osiris, disinherited her shortly before his death in 1907; back in 1879, when Emma
was 17 years old, she had married Sigismund Bardac in a synagogue build by Osiris,

13
Pierre Louÿs to Georges Louis, October 1904, quoted in Lesure, Claude Debussy, 266: ‘Le mari est
parti avec une juive de quarante et quelques années, Mme S. Bardac, je crois que tu connais Bardac ou
que du moins il est venu dans ton cabinet d’affaires. Très habitué aux fugues de sa femme, il répond
au souriant à ceux qui lui demandent de ses nouvelles : “Elle vient de se payer le dernier musicien à la
mode, mais c’est moi qui ai l’argent. Elle me reviendra.’
14
Jane Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 173.
15
‘Un drame parisien,’ Le Figaro (4 November 1903), 4. ‘Mme D…, une jeune femme, fort jolie, mariée à
un compositeur de musique très distingué.’
16
See also ‘Le théâtre et la vie,’ Le Temps (4 November 1903); Le Petit Journal (4 November 1904); ‘Un
divorce à l’horizon,’ Le Journal (4 November 1904).

4
and inaugurated that very day.17 Partly because of this lost inheritance, the Debussys’
financial situation was never stable; in fact, the composer’s economic problems were
to become more serious than they had been during his marriage with Lilly and before,
when he led a somewhat bohemian life.18 Even though his second marriage was a step
up on the social ladder, the result was not a happy bourgeois life – far from it.
As the affair went public, it also influenced the reception of his music. After
Ricardo Viñes’s first performance of L’isle joyeuse and Masques at the Société Nationale
on 18 February 1905, critic Jean Chantavoine evoked Beethoven, distinguishing
between true compositions and those ‘scribbled (barbouillées) for money’, and he
readily defined Debussy’s new works as ‘barbouillages’.19 Another critic said, without
further comment, that these works ‘are not worth his earlier productions’.20 Later, in
October 1905, according to Edward Lockspeiser, the composer was ‘very much aware
that the hostile reception of La Mer, especially by critics who had greeted Pelléas,
resulted from personal, rather than musical, reasons.’21
This negative image, born in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, re-emerged in
later narratives influenced by anti-Semitic prejudice such as Léon Vallas’s biographies
published in 1932 and 1944, the latter written at the time of the Vichy regime.
Debussy’s liaison to Bardac, says Vallas, was a ‘serious affair (grave aventure)’ whose
only motivation was his material interest to ‘be introduced in the then all-powerful
Jewish society, as this society was entitled to deliver commercial benefits, official
backing, and government subsidies for music.’22 Contrary to that view, the story of
L’isle Joyeuse, among many others, shows the intensity of their erotic and sentimental
relationship and the important role music played in it.

17
Dominique Jarrassé, Osiris, mécène juif et nationaliste français (Le Kremlin-Bicêtre: Editions
Esthétiques du divers, 2009).
18
Denis Herlin, ‘An Artist High and Low, or, Debussy and Money,’ Rethinking Debussy, 149-202.
19
Jean Chantavoine, Revue hebdomadaire (March 1905?), quoted in Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy et son
temps (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1932), 242.
20
Georges Servières, ‘La saison musicale à Paris (1904-1905)’, Revue universelle (1905), 369. ‘…ne valent
pas ses productions antérieures’.
21
Edward Lockspeiser, Claude Debussy (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 262: ‘Debussy a clairement conscience que
l’accueil hostile réservé à la Mer, en particulier par des critiques qui ont vanté les mérites de Pelléas, est
dû à des raisons personnelles, plutôt que musicales.’
22
Léon Vallas, Achille-Claude Debussy (Paris: PUF, 1944), 46-47; quoted in Sara Iglesias, Musicologie et
Occupation: Science, musique et politique dans la France des années noires (Paris: Editions de la Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme, 2015), 180: ‘…grave aventure… / …entrer dans la société juive, alors toute
puissante et seule dispensatrice des bénéfices commerciaux de la musique, des appuis officiels, des
subventions de l’Etat.’

5
‘A Tuesday in June 1904’
The idea that Claude Debussy composed L’isle joyeuse on the island of Jersey in the
Summer 1904, during the few days he spend there in the company of Emma Bardac, is
an historiographic legend, that makes this piano piece a sort of snapshot of the
beginnings of their relationship.23 Another tale on the origins of the work, equally
persistent in the literature, sees it as a musical transposition of the mythological cult to
Aphrodite, by taking at its word an allusion Debussy made in 1914 to a famous
painting at the Louvre: ‘it is a little bit like L’Embarquement pour Cythère, with less
melancholy than in Watteau.’24
Neither account is true. A first draft of the work existed already in June 1903,
when Debussy played it for Ricardo Viñes, the Catalan pianist who first performed it
in concert on the 10 February 1905.25 Also, the wording of the comment on Watteau –
‘a little bit like… less than…’ – argues against viewing the painting as the main source
of the music; it is likely, given the late date of the statement, that the association
between them came well after the completion of the piece. According to Viñes, the
composer had already evoked a pictorial inspiration for his music in 1903 – not by
Watteau, though, but by Turner, whose paintings he had just discovered in London at
the National Gallery, and none of which represented an island.26 In 1907, the composer
said that the origins of the work were ‘purely imaginary’,27 and this rings true as the
most likely scenario.
On the other hand, Debussy’s correspondence shows that the piece was revised
in August 1904, a few days after his sojourn with Emma on the island of Jersey.28 The
1903 manuscript being lost, it is hard to determine the exact nature of the revisions
made during the preparation of the final manuscript for its upcoming publication by
the publisher Jacques Durand. In a letter to Durand, Debussy deemed them ‘excellentes’
without giving any detail, yet implying that they went beyond a few corrections or
retouches.29 It is certain that they included at least the addition of a passage noted in

23
Klein, ‘Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse’, 32; Paul Roberts, Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy
(Portland: Amadeus Press, 1996), 101-102.
24
Claude Debussy to Désiré Walter, 13 July 1914, in Claude Debussy, Correspondance (1872-1918),
Denis Herlin and François Lesure (eds.) (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 1835. See Denis Herlin,
‘Introduction’, in Claude Debussy: L’isle joyeuse (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 2011), XVIII.
25
Ricardo Viñes, ‘Journal inédit de Ricardo Viñes (Ravel-Debussy-Duparc),’ Revue internationale de
musique française 1/2 (June 1980), 226.
26
Ibid. See https://artuk.org for the inventory of Turner’s paintings at the National Gallery, accessed
13/12/17.
27
‘Transcription des entretiens de Segalen avec Debussy’, in Debussy, Correspondance, 2204.
28
Claude Debussy to Jacques Durand, letters undated [between 31 July and 4 August 1904], 5 August,
11 August 1904, Correspondance, 859-862.
29
Debussy to Durand, 11 August 1904, in Debussy, Correspondance, 860.

6
one of the three remaining sketches of the work.30 In this source, held at the
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Roy Howat recognized the first draft of bars 117-144
of the published score (see Pl. 1).31

Pl. 1. Third sketch for Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse,

Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS 17729, fos. 5 and 6 .

30
Two of the three sketches, respectively hold at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Bibliothèque de
la Principauté de Monaco, were published in Debussy’s Œuvres complètes, whereas the third sketch is
only transcribed, without the verbal mention. See Claude Debussy, Œuvres complètes, Série I Vol.3,
Œuvres pour piano 3, Roy Howat (ed.) (Paris: Durand – Costallat, 1991); ‘Appendice’, 170; and ‘Fac-
similés’ 2 & 3, n.p.
31
Roy Howat, Debussy in proportion: A Musical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 62; id., ‘En route for L’isle joyeuse. The Restoration of a triptych’, Cahiers Debussy n°18 (1995), 38
f5.

7
The musical part of the sketch is followed by a written statement by the composer,
with a date:

(these bars belong to Mada[me] Bardac – p.m. – who dictated them

to me on a Tuesday of June 1904.
The passionate acknowledgement of
Claude Debussy32.

There is no reason to doubt that Debussy’s words alluded to a real encounter

with Emma Bardac that took place on ‘a Tuesday in June 1904’. We do not know if the
composer wrote the musical sketch on that very day in the company of Emma or later,
or if he wrote it some days after that. The wording suggests that the verbal comment
came later, maybe years after the episode, as a reminiscence on the origins of the
couple. But it is not impossible that it was written down on that very day in June,
together with the musical part, as bearing witness to a shared awareness of the
moment. In this last case, the musical fragment would be the recording in real time of
the transformation of ‘Madame Bardac’ in ‘p.m.’, ‘petite mienne’ (my little own). In his
letters to Emma, Debussy, for the rest of his life, was to use this expression by Jules
Laforgue, which in the original 1886 poem suggests a shared and lasting regular
intimacy:
‘Ô ma petite mienne, ô ma quotidienne
Dans mon petit intérieur
C’est à dire plus jamais ailleurs!
Ô ma petite quotidienne!...’33

Either as the result of a single instant or of two separated moments, the musical part
and the verbal part of the third sketch for L’isle joyeuse form a sort of private monument
to the birth of their love. By the form it belongs to, and probably inaugurates, the series
of Debussy’s ‘musical gifts’ to Emma - very short compositions with a few loving
words that he would offer her in the following years as a present for her birthday (4
June) or for Christmas.34

I suggest that this ‘Tuesday in June 1904’ in the third sketch for L’isle joyeuse
alludes – in a way that is elliptical for strangers but that was transparent for the lovers

32
Claude Debussy, sketch [n°3] for L’isle joyeuse, ‘Esquisses diverses’, Bibliothèque Nationale de France,
Ms 17729, folios 5 and 6. ‘les mesures ci-jointes appartiennent à Mada[me] Bardac – p. m. –qui me les
dicta un mardi de juin 1904. / la reconnaissance passionnée de son / Claude Debussy.
33
Jules Laforgue, Ô géraniums diaphanes, in Derniers vers, in Debussy, Correspondance, 855 f2.
34
Robert Orledge, ‘Debussy’s Musical Gifts to Emma Bardac’, The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 60 No. 4
(Oct., 1974), 544-556.

8
– to one of their first sexual encounters. Claude and Emma met in 1903, and ‘before
the end of that year’, says Lesure, ‘a complicity developed between them, with
dedications and gifts of manuscripts.’35 The erotic charge of their relationship increases
in the Spring of 1904. On Monday 6 June, Claude wrote to Emma to thank her for the
flowers she sent him in response to his dedicating Trois Chansons de France to her.
‘Forgive me, I kissed all these flowers as if they were a living mouth; might that be
mad? But you cannot hold that against me – it would be like holding against the wind
that’s blowing on you.’36 Three days later, on Thursday 9 June, in a ‘lettre
pneumatique’, he invited her to come to his apartment on the rue Cardinet, in the 17th
district of Paris:

Thursday
[9 June 1904]

‘It is raining hard on the city (Il pleut fortement sur la ville)’. Would
you be very nice to me by granting me a few moments this afternoon? –
I’d like so much to have you once ‘all alone’ without any counterpoint or
development. -
If you’d like to come to my place, I’d be madly happy, but you’ll
do as you like, so that it will be where you wish.
This does not come from a madman, but from a pure and a little
bit anguished desire (un pur désir un peu angoissé).
All yours.

Claude Debussy37

There was in fact a downpour in Paris on Thursday 9 June 1904: at the Parc
Montsouris weather station, near the south border of the city, the register for the day
was 15.7 mm.38 It was actually the rainiest day of this fateful spring, when the lives of
Claude Debussy and Emma Bardac changed forever. The first words of the letter
alluded both to the weather and to the verses by Paul Verlaine, ‘Il pleure dans mon cœur
/ comme il pleut sur la ville’, that Debussy had set to music in 1887, as a mélodie in the
cycle Ariettes oubliées.39 This poem, first published in 1874, contained a secret allusion

35
Lesure, Claude Debussy, 259.
36
Claude Debussy to Emma Bardac, Monday [6 June 1904], Debussy, Correspondance, 844: ‘Pardonnez-
moi si j’ai embrassé toutes ces fleurs comme une bouche vivante ; c’est peut-être fou ? Vous ne pouvez
tout de même m’en vouloir – pas plus qu’à un frôlement du vent, du moins.’
37
Ibid., 845. ‘jeudi / [9 juin 1904] / “Il pleut fortement sur la ville.” Voulez-vous être très gentille et
m’accorder quelques instants cet après-midi ? - Je voudrais tant vous avoir une fois ‘toute seule’ sans
contrepoint ni développement - / Si cela vous plaît de venir chez moi, j’en serai follement joyeux,
mais vous ferez comme il vous plaira et ça sera, alors, où vous voudrez. / Tout ceci n’est pas d’un fou
mais un pur désir un peu angoissé ! / Tout vôtre. / Claude Debussy.’
38
‘Climatologie à Paris-Montsouris (75) en juin 1904,’ https://www.infoclimat.fr/climatologie-
mensuelle/07156/juin/1904/paris-montsouris.html (accessed 3 October 2017).
39
Debussy, Correspondance, 845f.

9
to Arthur Rimbaud and had also been set to music in 1888 by Gabriel Fauré under the
title ‘Spleen’. And Verlaine’s text really is about spleen: ‘Quelle est cette langueur / Qui
pénètre mon cœur?’; and also: ‘Pour un cœur qui s’ennuie, / Ô le chant de la pluie!’ By
implicitly recalling the missing verse, ‘Il pleure dans mon cœur’, Debussy seems to allude
to his existential suffering while evoking for her, involuntary or not, two mélodies
loaded with sensuality, for Emma Bardac had had a liaison with Fauré back in 1892.
Was this a way of sharing the guilt, the desire of venturing together into uncharted
territory? Indeed, it is hard to ignore the erotic implications of this letter, with the ‘pure
and a little bit anguished desire’ of ‘having’ this woman ‘all alone’ in his apartment for
‘a few moments in the afternoon’ for an encounter ‘without counterpoint or
development.’
In Debussy’s letter these last musical terms have an equivocal, perhaps even
obscene resonance, in the first meaning of the word obscene – out of the scene. Yet, they
are borrowed from the public field of music aesthetics, expressed in the composer’s
musical criticism. In Monsieur Croche antidilettante, both words have negative
connotations: ‘Was there not an annoying disproportion between the theme and the
developments it supposedly gave way to?’ asks Debussy on the handling of folk tunes
by Russian composers, going on to denounce how ‘imperious counterpoints
summoned them to forget their peaceful origins.’ He also deplores César Franck’s
‘grey, tiresome and obstinate developments’ and praises Paul Dukas’s avoidance of
‘parasitical developments’.40 There are many other examples of how development and
counterpoint were at the time two keywords against which Debussy’s style defined
itself. They bring together the vertical axis of the present and the horizontal axis of
duration as a metaphor associating in a single aesthetic image the temporalities of
music and love. For Debussy, an encounter with no counterpoint or development
ought to be brief and joyful, far away from conventions, and close to nature – an
encounter very much like his own music.
In Claude’s letter to Emma, the musical metaphors also aim at seducing a
woman who is a performer of his music. Before the start of their relationship, she was
fascinated by the mélodies she sung accompanied by composer Charles Koechlin, to
whom she asked many questions about the composer, before trying to meet him in

40
Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche antidilettante (Paris: Librairies Dorbon-aîné / Nouvelle Revue
française, 1921), 34, 108, 47, 42: ‘N’y avait-il pas là une gênante disproportion entre le thème et ce
qu’on l’obligeait à fournir de développements ? / …d’impérieux contrepoints les sommèrent d’avoir à
oublier leur paisible origine / …ces développements en grisaille fatigante et obstinée…/
développements parasites.’

10
person. According to Mary Garden, both herself and Lilly Texier were first attracted
to him by the charm of C’est l’extase langoureuse, a mélodie from Ariettes oubliées, first
published in L’illustration. Speaking of ‘the erotic in Debussy’s music’, Julie McQuinn
notes that ‘women were drawn to a man whom they had never met through
experiencing his music, whether performing it or watching and hearing it
performed’41. The sensual aura of Debussy’s music was acknowledged at least since
the first performance of L’après-midi d’un faune in 1894, well before Nijinsky’s
scandalous 1912 performance, described by Lynn Garofala as the dancer’s ‘erotic
autobiography’.42
Of course, the composer was very much aware that his music contributed to his
personal aura. In a letter to ‘Chère petite mienne’ sent from Moscow in 1913, he writes:

Back from the rehearsal I want to tell you – in great haste – that I love
you! That you are my absolute little own (ma petite Mienne absolue)! and
also, that I am nevertheless so unhappy…!
Do you realize what you say when you write me ‘I don’t know
how to avoid begrudging your music’… There is some reason to be mad,
isn’t there? To begin with, between you and the music, it’s the music that
could be jealous! And if I still compose it, this music you so mistreat, it’s
just because I owe it to having met you, loved you, and the rest! You can
be sure that if I happened not to write it any more, you would be the one
who would stop loving me. For neither the limited charm of my
conversation, nor my physical appearance, would help me to keep you.43

Unfortunately, we don’t know Emma’s actual reasons to ‘begrudge’ the music of her
husband, since her own letter has not been published. There are too many things we
don’t know about her, starting with her side of the correspondence. In any case, by
this time their life together was far from being an island of joy. According to Robert
Orledge, ‘married life with Emma was anything but idyllic. She was frequently ill,
constantly possessive and extravagant, and far less easy to pacify than the naively
devoted Lilly had been’. On the other hand, he continues, ‘the fault was by no means

41
Julie McQuinn, ‘Exploring the erotic in Debussy’s music’, The Cambridge Companion to Debussy,
Simon Trezise ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 119.
42
Quoted in Penny Farfan, ‘Man as Beast: Nijinsky's Faun’, South Central Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, Staging
Modernism (Spring, 2008), 74-92.
43
Claude to Emma, 8 December 1913, Debussy, Correspondance, 1717. ‘En revenant de la répétition je
veux – en grande hâte – te dire que je t’aime ! que tu es ma petite Mienne absolue ! et que je suis quand
même bien malheureux..! /As-tu bien remarqué que tu m’as écrit “Je ne sais pas comment je ferai pour
ne pas garder rancune à ta musique”… Crois-tu qu’il n’y a pas de quoi perdre un peu la tête ? D’abord,
entre toi et la musique, s’il y avait quelqu’un qui pourrait être jaloux, c’est bien la musique ! Et, si je
continue à en faire et à l’aimer, c’est bien parce que je lui dois, à cette musique que tu traites si mal, de
t’avoir connue, aimée et le reste ! Sois bien sûre que s’il m’arrivait de ne plus en écrire, c’est peut-être
bien toi qui cesserais de m’aimer car, ce n’est, ni le charme un peu restreint de ma conversation ; ni mes
avantages physiques qui pourraient m’aider à te retenir ?’

11
all Emma’s. It was she, not Debussy, who wrote to her lawyer to enquire about a trial
separation during a matrimonial crisis in 1910’.44 Still, the 1913 letter from Russia
shows that throughout their marriage, music remained almost anthropomorphic, as
an imaginary lover, rival, or companion or some combination thereof. And this was
by no means idiosyncratic. Alban Berg used similar words in 1907 to claim his love to
his fiancée Helene after confessing the ‘infidelity’ of his listening with passion to
Mahler’s Third Symphony.45
The eroticization of music went beyond the realm of the couple. It can also be
found in the context of Debussy’s friendship with Pierre Louÿs, whose Chansons de
Bilitis he set to music first in 1897 in three mélodies, and then in 1901 as incidental music
for a recitation to tableaux vivants whose rehearsals Louÿs described with delight: ‘I’m
spending all my afternoons this week with naked women’.46 After the show, Le Journal
(a paper for which Louÿs often wrote) praised ‘a gracious, ingeniously archaic music’,
and ‘the precious contribution of [the women’s] impeccable shapes’: ‘the viewers felt
transported to the great age of pure nudity.’47 According to McQuinn, ‘in the case of
Debussy, every possible relationship seems to have carried with it an erotic tinge, and
thus a web of relationships filled with erotic possibilities, all orbiting around a music
that defied convention.’48
In June 1904, the desire of a married man to invite a married woman to his
apartment while his wife was out might not have been that of a madman, as in
Debussy’s disclaimer in his letter to Emma, but it still rings like madness today. An
encounter did take place that Thursday, though, given what Debussy wrote on a copy
of Printemps, an 1882 work just published by Durand: ‘This copy belongs
exclusively/to Madame Bardac:/ 9 June 1904, a day when it rained to make one lose
faith in every kind of Spring./And yet, there it was’.49 It is difficult to know whether
Claude and Emma made love that day, in the few moments they had been alone
during Lilly’s absence. On 19 June, from St Rémy-la-Chevreuse, thirty-five kilometers

44
Robert Orledge, ‘Debussy the man’, The Cambridge Companion to Debussy, 21-22.
45
Alban Berg to Helene Nahowski, n.d. [1907], in Alban Berg, Briefe an seine Frau (Munich and Vienna:
Albert Langen / Georg Müller, 1965), 21.
46
Quoted in McQuinn, ‘Exploring the erotic’, 128. See David Grayson, ‘Bilitis and Tanagra: Afternoons
with Nude Women’. Debussy and His World, Jane Fulcher (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 117-140.
47
Le Journal, Paris, 8 February 1901, quoted in McQuinn, ‘Exploring the erotic’, 128. ‘…une musique
gracieuse, ingénieusement archaïque’, / ‘le précieux appoint de leurs forms impeccables’ / ‘les
spectateurs purent se croire transportés aux grandes époques de la nudité pure’.
48
McQuinn, ‘Exploring the erotic’, 119.
49
Debussy, Correspondance, 2219. ‘Cet exemplaire appartient uniquement/à Madame Bardac:/ 9 juin
1904, jour où il pleuvait à/perdre l’espoir de tout[e] espèce de Printemps,/et pourtant...il était
là./Claude Debussy.’

12
from Paris, Debussy sent a postcard to her with just the handwritten initial motif of Le
faune, a mélodie from the second series of Fêtes galantes.50 There is no text on the card,
but the music is set to verses by Verlaine: ‘An old faun made of terra-cotta / stands
laughing in the middle of the lawn / doubtless predicting an unhappy /sequel to these
serene moments.51 Did Debussy compare himself to an ‘old faun’, already sensing the
difficulties to come, while acknowledging recent happiness? The following day, he
sent a second postcard to ‘Mme Bardac’, followed by a question mark.52 Did the
formality of addressing her as Mme Bardac suggest some remaining social distance?
Or rather guilt after bliss? And what about the question mark?
One thing is sure: whatever happened the 9 June, its sequel was not (only) an
unhappy one. Presumably in the same period, he wrote the following words on a
visiting card:
Yes…! Yes! Yes!
(the choir)
even to the bad dinner
Yours (votre)53

This might well have been Claude’s answer to an invitation to dinner, one Emma
deemed ‘bad’ as a sign of conventional social modesty. The emphatic and choral ‘yes’
followed by the humorous anti-climax of the last sentence shows not only his
enthusiasm, but also how their whole story was clothed in musical metaphors. And
when an encounter took place, most probably in the night of the 21st or the 28th, that
‘Tuesday in June 1904’ must have truly made a difference in the ordinary pace of their
lives, like an island in the ocean. A month later, an unfinished letter to Emma – actually
half of a sentence in a paper found by Lilly, Debussy’s first wife – employs the
tutoiement and Laforgue’s formula, proving their newly gained intimacy: ‘Je t’écris ceci,
ma petite Mienne adorée, la tête…’ 54 In short, I suggest that L’isle joyeuse, the piano piece
about an island of joy, bears the mark of the physical love of Emma and Claude; that
it is, somehow, the very place of the encounter of the lovers, the sensual island itself.
Now, does the fact that the first version of L’isle joyeuse was drafted in 1903 not
disprove this hypothesis? Is this not precisely the legend mentioned at the beginning

50
Denis Herlin, email to the author, 20 May 2018. The postcard is reproduced in the Correspondance,
848, with no identification of the music.
51
English trans. Peter Low, http://www.lieder.net/lieder/assemble_texts.html?SongCycleId=78? Un
vieux faune de terre cuite / Rit au centre des boulingrins,/ Présageant sans doute une suite / Mauvaise à ces
instants sereins.
52
Claude Debussy to Emma Bardac, Debussy, Correspondance, 848.
53
Claude Debussy, visiting card, Debussy, Correspondance, 850: ‘Oui…! Oui! Oui! / (le choeur) / même
pour le mauvais dîner. Votre…’
54
Claude Debussy to Emma Bardac, Debussy, Correspondance, 855.

13
of this paper? Not quite. The evidence suggests that in 1903, before his liaison with
Emma Bardac, Debussy’s fantasy was focused on the ‘purely imaginary’ cliché of an
exotic and joyous island, leading him to start basing a musical piece on it. This also
appears in his using the old word isle in the title, rather than the modern île. Roy Howat
has noted striking similarities with Balakirev’s Islamey, an ‘oriental fantasy’ full of
sensuous resonances, pre-eminent in Viñes’s repertory.55 In September 1903, Debussy
wrote down in a letter an idea for the title of De l’aube a midi sur la mer, the first
movement of La Mer: ‘Mer belle aux îles sanguinaires’, the name of an archipelago near
Corsica, as if the very first image for his symphonic masterwork was also an island he
had never seen.56 Later on, in 1904, this fantasy contributed to eroticizing his
relationship with a woman he felt was capable of fulfilling it, so much so that he
revised his recent piano piece to insert a trace of that desire. In other words, I argue
that L’isle joyeuse inspired the trip to the Isle of Jersey, rather than the other way
around.
Sources suggest, then, that the revision of the 1903 manuscript started on ‘a
Tuesday in June 1904’, with a sexual encounter preceded or followed by a moment
musical during which Claude played a still unknown composition that expressed his
exotic/erotic fantasy, to which Emma responded by ‘dictating’, i.e. by singing. This
definitely sounds like the most likely scenario. It is hard to believe that Debussy would
have left indications that something essential happened precisely in that month to the
effect that his pur désir un peu angoissé had been physically frustrated; it is hard to
believe that a moment of unfulfilled passionate love can be alluded to as an instant
serein. Nevertheless, we cannot completely rule out that things went otherwise. In that
other scenario, L’isle joyeuse was invested in June with the yearning for a forbidden
love, and its climaxes were the dreamed-of form of delights still to come; Claude and
Emma made love for the first time in July 1904 at the Grand Hotel of the Isle of Jersey,
and that day, quite extraordinarily, L’isle joyeuse was their shared fantasy come true:
the sonic image of their intersubjective sexual script.57
True, this windy English island close to the Normandy coast does not have the
erotic charm of Gauguin’s Marquises Islands, or that of Madagascar which inspired

55
Roy Howat, ‘Russian Imprints in Debussy’s Piano Music’, Rethinking Debussy, Elliott Antokoletz and
Marianne Wheeldon (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42-47.
56
Debussy to André Messager, 12 September 1903, Correspondance, 789.
57
John Gagnon, An Interpretation of Desire. Essays in the Study of Sexuality (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2004).

14
Ravel to compose the sensual Chansons madécasses without ever going there.58 But the
dream machine of the travel agencies always depends on technology, and Jersey’s
Grand Hotel, with its direct access to the beach, was a fashionable resort – ‘the largest,
the best appointed, and the leading hotel in the Channel Islands’, according to a 1905
advertisement.59 And it does seem that these days on the island, between the end of
July and the beginning of August,60 were indeed happy and joyous: ‘But this country
is a delight, I’m at peace which is better still, and I’m completely free to work, which
hasn’t been the case for a long time... […] The sea (la Mer) has behaved beautifully
toward me and shown me all her guises’, wrote Debussy, who at that time was
composing La Mer, a work he had drafted without ever having much direct experience
of the sea nor of the beach, a place he did not particularly like, except for that fateful
Jersey sojourn.61 In the same letter to his editor, he provided the dedication for the
second book of Fêtes galantes: ‘In appreciation of the month of June 1904’, followed by
the letters ‘A.l.p.M.’ [à la petite Mienne] It’s a little mysterious’, he added, ‘but one has
to make some contribution to legend, doesn’t one?’62
The third sketch suggests that Emma Bardac, far from becoming just a passive
character in Claude Debussy’s fantasy, played an active role in what must have been
a shared scenario. And we might even speculate that her willingness to play it, and to
share with him her own fantasy, contributed to their mutual seduction. ‘Debussy
claimed that the passage in question had been dictated to him by Emma Bardac’, writes
Roy Howat, ‘but it was maybe a poetic license.’63 This sceptical comment brings her
close to the conventional image of the muse rather than to that of an active partner of
the aestheticization of life through music. But what exactly is poetic license? And why
couldn’t we take Debussy at his word here? Is it so absurd to imagine a scene of ecstatic
love where a singer whispers a whole-tone scale to a composer: F, G, A, B, C#… D#…?
Yes, it is impossible to know. But Lesure observes that sending flowers, like Emma

58
Federico Lazzaro, ‘Chansons madécasses, modernisme et érotisme. Pour une écoute de Ravel au-delà
de l’exotisme’. Revue musicale OICRM 3/1 (2014), http://revuemusicaleoicrm.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/RMO_vol.3.1_Lazzaro.pdf (accessed 16 January 2018).
59
https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Grand_Hotel, accessed 27 December 2017. See Diane
Enget Moore. ‘Debussy in Jersey, Summer 1904’, http://www.litart.co.uk/jersey.htm (accessed 5
October 2017).
60
Herlin, ‘Introduction’, XVII.
61
See Rémy Campos, Debussy à la plage (Paris, 2018).
62
Claude Debussy to Jacques Durand, undated [between 31 July and 4 August 1904], Debussy,
Correspondance, 859. Translation in Moore, ‘Debussy in Jersey’. ‘Mais ce pays est ravissant, j’y suis
tranquille ce qui est encore mieux et je travaille en toute liberté, ce qui ne m’est pas arrivé depuis
longtemps… […] La Mer a été très bien pour moi, elle m’a montré toutes ses robes. […] pour
remercier le mois de Juin 1904 ; suivies des lettres A. l. p. M [à la petite Mienne]’.
63
Roy Howat, ‘Avant-propos’, in Debussy, Œuvres complètes, XII.

15
did, was at that time something ‘more masculine than feminine’,64 to which Claude
replied by writing a passionate letter. And it is also an active role that the musician-
lover acknowledges by saying that these bars were dictated by his performer-lover, and
that therefore they belong to her. Thus, he acknowledges that his music is also partly
that of this woman who, by the same token, he claims belongs to him – for as much is
implied, literally, by petite mienne.
It could be objected that Emma’s theme, far from representing a kind of alterity,
is nothing but a whole-tone scale, one of the most typical traits of Debussy’s music.
How can a specific semantics of desire be attached to it? This connects with broader
issues on the reception of Debussy. The thematic role of the whole-tone scale in L’isle
joyeuse (first performed in January 1905) corresponds to a turning point in the social
perception of his style. Whole-tone scales, already a technical trait of his music, became
a true aesthetic claim around the controversial first performance of Pelléas in 1902.
‘Everywhere a vague singing, a sad dawn… and the whole-tone scale. It’s musical
impressionism’, wrote Raymond Bouyer in 1905 on L’isle joyeuse and other recent
works by Debussy and Ravel.65 Two years later, in his article ‘Debussy et les
debussystes’, Emile Vuillermoz coined the ironic expression ‘faire du Debussy’, inciting
several other critics to define his much-imitated style; the whole-tone scale is
prominent in what M.-D. Calvocoressi called ‘le système harmonique de M. Debussy’.66 In
1911, Arnold Schoenberg explained in his Harmonielehre that the whole-tone scale he
used in 1905 in his symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande did not owe anything to
Debussy, thus showing that this novelty had become a landmark in the history of
music.67
Debussy’s système harmonique, especially the whole-tone scale, was a symbol of
himself, and also a crucial element for the sensual quality of his music. In L’isle joyeuse,
the whole-tone scale is structurally important throughout the piece, but only with
Emma’s theme does it become a melody that a lover of Debussy’s music like, say,
Emma Bardac herself, might sing or hum while thinking of him. From that point of
view, the bars ‘dictated’ by Emma to Claude ‘on a Tuesday in June 1904’ result from

64
Lesure, Claude Debussy, 260.
65
Raymond Bouyer, ‘L’impressionnisme en musique et le culte de Beethoven’. Revue bleue. Revue
politique et littéraire (January-June 1905), 606. ‘Partout un chant vague, une aube triste… et la gamme
par tons. C’est l’impressionnisme musical…’
66
Emile Vuillermoz, ‘Debussy et les debussystes’. La Nouvelle presse (3 March 1907); M.-D.
Calvocoressi, ‘Les Histoires naturelles de M. Ravel et l’imitation debussyste’, La Grande revue (10 May
1907), 514, quoted in Marianne Wheeldon, ‘Debussy, le debussysme et les Chansons de Charles
d’Orléans’, in Regards sur Debussy, Myriam Chimènes and Alexandra Laederich (eds.) (Paris: Fayard,
2013), 211-212.
67
Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 393.

16
an injunction saying more or less: my desire is that you write down for my pleasure the
musical image of your desiring self.
Now, once Emma Bardac’s participation in the creative process is
acknowledged, L’isle joyeuse is still, of course, a piece by Claude Debussy. This is true
of his identifying the twenty-seven bars ‘dictated by Emma’ as a separate entity in the
first place. Like other ‘musical gifts’ to her, the third sketch for L’isle joyeuse might be
seen itself as a musical work, a 30-second piece of piano music. It’s time now to have
a look at these bars ‘dictated’ by Emma, as they appear in the manuscript (see Pl. 2).68

PL. 2. Debussy, L’isle joyeuse, autograph manuscript, bb. 117-44

Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS 977, pp. 4-5

At bar 117 we hear distinctly in the low register, piano but ‘expressif et en dehors’,
a new theme ascending by whole tones followed by a major third (F, G, A, B, C#, D#,

68
The autograph manuscript is available at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52000086z.

17
G) on a progressively distorted ternary rhythm: let’s call it ‘Emma’s theme’, since it
‘belongs’ to her. This happens against the ongoing background of the right hand 3/8
fast descending and ascending arpeggios on G and B, with G in the bass – a dominant
sonority, given the emphatic C major of the previous bars 112-114. Key to the
expressive tension is the rhythmic contrast between the two-bar hypermetrical beat of
the right hand and the rubato-like slowing down of the pulse of the left-hand melody,
from a quaver to a dotted crotchet between bars 117 and 122. Once its highpoint G at
bar 120 is reached, the ascending new theme merges with a descending three-notes
motif G-F-E, which is repeated in an augmented form at bars 123-126. (Significantly,
since it gave a more dynamic pace to the whole passage, the adding of bars 123 and
124 was the only difference, except for notational conventions, between the sketch and
the revised manuscript).69 This twice descending suffix compensates for the previous
upward momentum of Emma’s theme, while harmony fluctuates between G, Gb and
Ab with raised fifth, thus undermining the dominant sonority.
At bar 129, prepared by the bass on Bb, this whole material is transposed a semi-
tone higher, with Emma’s theme starting on Gb and the right-hand arpeggio playing
Ab and C – like Ab major without the fifth, except that the bass wanders through B
and A. Over this unstable harmony, the melody in the left hand wavers down from
the new Ab highpoint, but this time without repeating this last, thus accelerating the
pace. The overall acceleration is still enhanced at bar 137 by the verticalization of the
four first notes of Emma’s theme in medium register sonorities, F-G and A-B. The
hemiola of this bell-like motif, played in crotchets against the 3/8 rhythm of the upper
register, builds momentum through a dramatic crescendo, where the now confirmed
dominant sonority prepares a clear resolution on a C major triad at bar 141. The tonic
is twice hammered forte, with a grace note D#, and twice prolonged in vertiginous
four-octave arpeggios.70
The nearly thirty seconds ‘dictated’ by Emma, even if they flow without
interruption from the preceding section, constitute a self-contained form with strong
inner momentum, from low dynamics and elongated rhythm to an accelerated pace in
higher register and intensity, and whose complex harmony encompasses a broad

69
Row Howat sees this feature as a furtherance of long-range proportional symmetries. Independently
from this, the modification enhances acceleration throughout the passage covered by the sketch. See
Howat. Debussy in Proportion, 62.
70
Dmitri Tymoczko, ‘Scale Networks and Debussy’, Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Fall, 2004),
219-294 at 254-263.

18
dominant – tonic cadence, G major to C major. The temporal shape of the whole
passage can be visualized in a spectrogram (See Pl. 3).

Pl. 3. Spectrogram of L’isle joyeuse, bb. 117-44, after the 1961 recording by Magda Tagliaferro
(the arrows indicate the two C major chords at bb. 141 and 143). Courtesy of Simon Garrette

This shape, which elaborates a new theme – ‘Emma’s theme’ – with a steady
upwards intensity curve leading to a sustained climax, is far from giving way to
silence. The passage ends at bar 144, not on a closing C major triad but on an open C
arpeggio with no third, and it fuses with the following C major section. Indeed, when
the third sketch is over, we are still far from the section leading to the final apotheosis,
which actually begins at bar 186. In short, the third sketch depicts an open-ended
climax. Given the biographical context, as a climax ‘dictated’ by a woman and not
followed by silence, can we say it is a feminine orgasm?

On climax as (male) orgasm, and vice-versa

To answer that question, we need to discuss what it can possibly mean to speak
of orgasms in music. Let’s start with Michael Klein’s comment: ‘the music reaches
orgasm’.71 This alludes to the arrival of the A major chord in bar 252 of L’isle joyeuse,
three bars before the end. For him, orgasm is synonymous with, and/or a metaphor
for, climax, and specifically, ‘culminating climax’. Dropped in the middle of a
technical, even if idiosyncratic, description of Debussy’s score where climax has

71
Klein, ‘Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse’, 36.

19
already been used, the word introduces a climactic poetic gesture in a prosaic scholarly
text. And since in English orgasm is one of the meanings of climax, the poetry lies here
in literality, as if taking the form at its word. But if orgasm is a kind of experience, what
does it mean to say that music is its subject? Here there is no human subject at all, this
orgasm exists without anyone experiencing it, and it is neither masculine nor feminine.
Such an attribution of agency to the music is consistent with Klein’s interpretation of
the piece as a ‘territorial assemblage’ in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand
Plateaus, i.e. free of ‘intention and history’, free also of ‘the authorial voice’.72
This can be compared to the very human ‘musical orgasm’ Christopher
Chowrimootoo hears at the end of the first act of Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice,
when the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach sings ‘I love you’ in the presence of
young Tadzio. I quote him at some length:

Britten heightens the theatricality of this ending with the kind of ‘grand
climax’ and ‘blatant emotion’ that the opera was said to reject. In musical
terms, it is perhaps best described as a total crescendo -dynamic,
rhythmic, textural and registral - followed by a sudden brass-punctuated
climax accompanying Aschenbach’s apparently wordless cry. However,
given opera’s long-standing generic association with jouissance, we might
think of other terms here. The sense of post-coital calm is captured by the
sustained bass drone, combined with the tenor’s ‘almost spoken’
descending third on the words ‘love you’, that immediately follow the
climax. … Indeed, the proximity of the passage to an evocation of orgasm
marks it as one of the most conspicuous examples of ‘body music’73.

The author makes of this ‘musical orgasm’ a kind of operatic ‘grand climax’,
characterizing it, quite tautologically, by its likeness to ‘an evocation of orgasm’. This
is based in two traits, the ‘total crescendo’ and the vocal falling third. While the
analogy with the experience of a real orgasm may seem obvious, it does not have much
to do with sonic expressions of climactic pleasure, like rhythmical ‘aah’s and ‘ooh’s.
Rather, the capability of this musical form to ‘evoke’ an orgasm is mediated by a
generic convention -opera’s alleged Lacanian jouissance- and by a dramaturgical
context -the eroticized gaze of the male protagonist on the object of his desire. For this
reason, it is indisputably a masculine orgasm, if any. The music expresses the
character’s fantasy; it tells what the text and the bodies do not tell. But since the
characters are not by any means supposed to have sex, the representation of this

72
Klein, ‘Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse’, 50.
73
Christopher Chowrimootoo, ‘Bourgeois opera: ‘Death in Venice’ and the aesthetics of sublimation’,
Cambridge Opera Journal 22/2 (July 2010), 175-216 at 204.

20
passage as an orgasm is the triple result of a musical form, and a context, and the
willingness of the author to activate the affordance of form and context by writing
‘musical orgasm’ in the first place74.
Chowrimootoo conflates two senses of the word climax: the first, ‘grand climax’,
designates the whole passage; the second makes of climax an instant or a point, indeed
a high point, which gives way to the ‘post-coital’ phase. Also for Klein, the culminating-
climax-as-orgasm is a point in time, while resulting from a process driven by ‘sexual
energy’. This mirrors an ambiguity in the musicological literature. In a 1984 paper on
Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Kofi Agawu noted that the word climax derives from the
Greek ladder or staircase, thus denoting ‘an arrangement of figures in ascending order
of intensity’, whereas nowadays it ‘refers to the highest point only of a given process’.
To avoid confusion, he uses highpoint, and never uses climax at all.75
An ‘ascending order of intensity’ also characterizes climax as a figure of speech
in classical rhetoric, for which the Encyclopédie gives this example from Cicero, where
it happens twice in a row: ‘You do nothing, you attempt nothing, you think nothing
that I don’t not only hear of, but also see and openly perceive’.76 Such rhetorical
climaxes can combine with erotic music climaxes, as in John Dowland’s madrigal Come
again: ‘To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die / With thee again in sweetest sympathy’,
says the text; the passage is built on a rising motif that culminates in a sustained
highpoint on the word ‘die’, before gently descending.77
Now, as the upper ladder of a staircase, orgasm is always part of a longer sexual
act, and, far from being just a point in time, it has its own duration and rhythm.78 Both
point and section are needed to describe musical phenomena that can be characterized as
orgasms. Both are present in Leonard B. Meyer’s definition of a ‘statistical climax’, namely
‘a gradual increase in the intensity of the more physical attributes of sound, the arrival
at a tensional “highpoint”, followed by a usually rapid decline in activity – a falling-
away to quiet and closure.’79 Statistical climax is so named ‘because the intensity of the
secondary parameters that shape such processes [intensity, pitch, rate of note

74
See Eric F. Clarke, Ways of Listening. An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
75
Kofi Agawu, ‘Structural ‘Highpoints’ in Schumann’s ‘Dichterliebe’’, Music Analysis 3/2 (Jul., 1984),
159-180 at 160.
76
Nihil agis, nihil moliris, nihil cogitas, quod ego non audiam, non videam, planeque sentiam.
77
See Clive Pageth, ‘The 10 sexiest moments in classical music’.
https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au, 14 February 2016.
78
Kenneth Mah and Yitzchak M. Binik, ‘The nature of human orgasm: A critical review of major
trends’, Clinical Psychology Review 21/6 (2001), 823–856.
79
Leonard B. Meyer, ‘Exploiting Limits: Creation, Archetypes, and Style Change’, Daedalus, Vol. 109,
No. 2, Intellect and Imagination: The Limits and Presuppositions of Intellectual Inquiry (Spring, 1980), 177-
205 at 189-190.

21
succession, timbre and tempo] can be measured and quantified’. When such a climax
becomes a ‘powerful statement of majestic affirmation’, Meyer calls it ‘apotheosis’.80 It
is opposed to ‘syntactical climax’, where parameters ‘move from a state characterized
by relative mobility, ambiguity, uniformity, or irregularity, to one of relative stability,
coherent process, and clear form.’81 Even if a climax can be both statistical and
syntactical, as in some symphonic recapitulations, the first type is most pertinent here.
The ways in which evolving parameters converge or diverge are explored in
Austin T. Patty’s study of ‘pacing scenarios’, a sophisticated description of how
nineteenth-century classical music arrives at climaxes and moves on from them. The
analysis of such spots of the music of Dvorák or Brahms leads him to a four-case
categorization: surge, struggle, tumble and settle.82 This classification is useful for discussing
potential ‘musical orgasms’ such as the ‘total crescendo’ alluded to above – a surge in his
vocabulary. On the other hand, climax only designates for him highpoints without
duration nor specification. Brad Osborn makes the point in his study of ‘terminally
climactic forms’ in rock music where, taking the opposite stance, climax is a section.83 In
recent years, he argues, experimental rock songs often end with ‘climax sections’
characterized by new thematic material and some enhanced parameter (like a new melody
sung and played in a higher pitch and louder, such as Radiohead’s Faust Arp). These rock
climaxes, like the operatic ‘grand climaxes’ alluded to above, can be quite long; Osborn’s
prototypical example is The Beatles’ Hey Jude, whose final section lasts about half the song.
It is probably no accident that in these two studies the classical music specialist tends to
equate climax with instant gratification, whereas the rock specialist hears climaxes that go
on. Typical paces for representing desire are arguably influential in the definition of many
music genres.
From Bach to The Beatles, statistical climaxes are a common way of ending a piece
of music. And the etymology of the word apotheosis –the accessing of a mortal hero to the
status of a god- implies that there can be one, and only one of them in any given work,
namely at the end. This was Gustav Mahler’s view, when, in a letter to Richard Strauss, he
spoke of how at some point of the finale of his First Symphony ‘the conclusion is merely
apparent (in the full sense of a ‘false conclusion’)’, since, he continues, ‘my intention
was to show a victory in which victory is furthest from the protagonist when he

80
Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 204.
81
Meyer, ‘Exploiting limits’, 190.
82
Austin T. Patty, ‘Pacing Scenarios: How Harmonic Rhythm and Melodic Pacing Influence Our
Experience of Musical Climax’, Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2009), 325-367.
83
Brad Osborn, ‘Subverting the Verse–Chorus Paradigm: Terminally Climactic Forms in Recent Rock
Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring 2013), 23-47 at 26n20.

22
believes it is closest – this is the nature of every spiritual struggle – for there it is by no
means simple to become a hero.’84 The vocabulary of hero and victory pertains to epic
literature, and the notion of ‘spiritual struggle’ gives it a broader scope, as a narrative
on a human subject who is normatively male, perhaps inspiring the designation of
previous highpoints as ‘premature’ in some accounts of Mahler’s music.85
This view on the unicity of climax was also Vincent d’Indy’s, who as a
preeminent composer and teacher and the leader of the Société Nationale de Musique
and the Schola Cantorum, was Debussy’s most important rival in the French musical
field. D’Indy was the theoretician of the sonate cyclique, a reinterpretation of
Beethoven’s sonata form through the motivic working of César Franck, based on the
return of its initial materials, up to a triumphant resolution. This model had a strong
normative value: after hearing a work by his pupil Alfred Roussel, d’Indy reproached
him with the lack of ‘any sense of emphatic statement in the [last] movement.’86 In this
first symphony by Roussel, subtitled Le poème de la forêt, written in 1904-1906 at the
time of the quarrel between d’indyistes and debussystes, Brian Hart detects the influence
of Debussy, whose own works seldom ended with climaxes at all, at least in the years
prior to Pelléas and Mélisande’s first performance in 1902.
Marianne Wheeldon claims that Debussy’s earlier incursion in the sonate
cyclique, with his String Quartet in G minor (1893), was purposefully aimed at having
the work performed at the Société Nationale at a time when he was still actively
looking for recognition by his colleagues. The following year, once this recognition
was achieved, he premiered there Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a piece that seems
to disappear in a harmonically instable ppp.87 According to Simon Trezise, ‘climaxes
that dissolve almost before they have begun and whose function does not seem
designed to signpost a clear point of formal departure, such as a recapitulation, have
been viewed as essential qualities of both Debussy’s style and the Impressionist
movement in music.’88 At the opposite end of the scale, d’Indy’s own works, already
at the time of his first Symphonie cévénole (1887), and later with what Hart calls his
‘message-symphonies’, ended with monumental climaxes loaded with narrative

84
Mahler to Strauss, 19 July 1894, Correspondence, 1888-1911 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 37;
quoted in The Finale of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony: Long-Range Musical Thought’, Journal of the Royal
Musical Association, Vol. 112, No. 2 (1986 - 1987), 257-279 at 261.
85
Baxendale, ‘The Finale of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony’, 260; Richard A. Kaplan, ‘Temporal fusion and
climax in the Symphonies of Mahler’, The Journal of Musicology, 14/2 (1996), 213-232 at 226.
86
Vincent d’Indy to Albert Roussel, paraphrased in Brian Hart, ‘Vincent d’Indy and the Development
of the French Symphony’, Music & Letters, 87/2 (May, 2006), 256 n. 105.
87
Marianne Wheeldon, ‘Debussy and La Sonate cyclique’, The Journal of Musicology 22/4 (Fall 2005), 644-
679.
88
Simon Trezise., Debussy: La mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51.

23
content, as in the triumph of good over evil in his Second Symphony (1909), or with
the triumph of France over Germany in the Third (1915-1919), the latter represented
through the massive orchestration of a Gregorian chant.89
Such statistical climaxes, Meyer observes, are easy to grasp by anyone, a trait
that in his view makes them more egalitarian than syntactical ones. Through them, ‘by
literally overwhelming the listener’, ‘unity is established, so to speak, by the
transcendence of the sublime’.90 Alex Rehding comments: ‘The power of such music to
overwhelm could also harbour the seeds of certain totalitarian features: the apotheosis
is a climax that does not permit objections’.91 Rehding is talking here about
‘monumental music’ for public commemorations, something quite the opposite of
musical representations of affects and intimacy. Yet the parallel with orgasms is useful,
not least because it highlights the paradoxes of scale; in music, a love scene can be as
grandiose as a political event, and even the most private feelings can be ‘monumental’.
Orgasm is clearly not a totalitarian ideological device, but it definitely is an
overwhelming experience, for which no education is needed, and to which it is really
hard to object.
To what extent, then, do all statistical climaxes and apotheosis afford
descriptions as orgasms? As much is implied in Susan McClary’s claim that tonality
itself channels ‘images of desire’ eventually leading to ‘metaphorical ejaculation’, as
exemplified by works of Beethoven and Mahler.92 This is related to her feminist
critique of gender prejudice in music theory and reception history, epitomized by the
use of ‘feminine endings’ for cadences that fall on a ‘weak’ beat (i.e. a metrical upbeat).
Contrary to this last case and other examples, though, her claim on apotheosis-as-
ejaculations is not based on verbal reception materials, but on her interpretation of the
music alone. This implies a strong conjectural dimension, and exposes it to Richard
Taruskin’s objecting to ‘argument by analogy’ on the grounds that ‘it easily confuses
analogy with identity, forgetting that analogies identify similarities within
disparities’93.
Now, critics acknowledge that ‘there is something right about [her] descriptions
of the music itself’, and urge the reader to listen ‘with McClary in hand’ the

89
Hart, ‘Vincent d’Indy’, 248-253. See also Brian Hart, ‘The symphony in Debussy’s world’, Debussy
and his world, 181-201.
90
Meyer, ‘Exploiting limits’, 190.
91
Alexander Rehding, ‘Liszt’s Musical Monuments’, 19th-Century Music, XXVI/1, 52–72 at 56.
92
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings. Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: Minnesota University
Press, 1991), 125 and 127.
93
Richard Taruskin, ‘Material Gains: Assessing Susan McClary’, Music & Letters Vol. 90 n°3 (Aug.
2009), 453-467 at 464.

24
recapitulation of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, where she famously heard
‘the consequent juxtaposition of desire and unspeakable violence’.94 In Nicholas
Cook’s words, her interpretation ‘builds on the objective properties of the musical
trace in such a way as to construct and communicate a quite distinctive way of
experiencing the passage’95. McClary’s general argument on ‘metaphorical
ejaculations’ can be illustrated by comparing a graph of the standard intensity curve
for musical climaxes, defined by Austin Patty as a ‘pattern of growth and decline’96,
and the graph Wilhelm Reich included in his 1942 book The Function of Orgasm:97

Pl. 4. Intensity curve from Austin Patty, ‘Pacing Scenarios’, 328

Pl. 5. Graph for orgasm from Wilhelm Reich, The Function of Orgasm, 103.
F = forepleasure, P = penetration, A [C?] = climax, R = relaxation.

94
Nick Zangwill, ‘Susan McClary and musical formalism’, The Musical Times Vol. 155 n°1929 (Winter
2014), 63-69 at 64.
95
Nicholas Cook, ‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’, Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 2001), 170-
195 at 183.
96
Patty, ‘Pacing Scenarios’, 328.
97
Wilhelm Reich, The Function of Orgasm. Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy (1942) (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), 103.

25
 The shapes are roughly the same, even if Patty’s graph allows for several peaks
of growing intensity and a slow abatement, whereas in Reich’s there is only one peak
and the tension drops much faster. Reich developed his ‘bioelectrical’ model as part of
a study of ‘sex economy’, claiming that the ‘orgasm formula’ –‘tension → charge →
discharge →relaxation’– was the very ‘life formula’.98 However, we do not need to
assume Reich’s essentialist views on orgasm and life to note the analogy between
Patty’s generic intensity curve and his picture of the ‘typical phases of the sexual act’.
The analogy is not only one of visual shapes but also one of temporal scale. ‘Duration
from five to twenty-minutes’, writes Reich under his graph; the data could be refined,
but the duration of the sexual act is clearly comparable to that of many pieces of music,
including most movements of the classic repertoire. A comparison could also be made,
at an anthropological level, between the temporal settings of the rituals of love-making
and those of concert-going, where applauding is a ‘terminally climactic form’.
Even if Reich claims that his model applies both to male and female, he clearly
grants a normative status to masculine experience, as shown by the abrupt descent
that precedes the ‘relaxation’ phase. Robert Scholes has claimed that ‘the archetype of
all fiction is the sexual act. (…) For what connects fiction – and music – with sex is the
fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and
resolution.’99 This metaphor is also based on the normative value of masculine orgasm,
thus exposing it to feminist critique. ‘Those of us who know no art of delaying climax
or, reading, feel no incipient tumescence, may well be barred from the pleasure of this
‘full fictional act’’, writes Teresa De Lauretis, in reaction to Scholes’ implicit belief in
the ‘inherent maleness of all narrative movement’.100 McClary, in turn, says that
Scholes is ‘guilty of both essentializing and universalizing what is in fact a particular
version of ‘the sexual act’’; yet she does take Scholes’ point, by claiming that male
‘orgastic rhythm’ has archetypal status for narratives in patriarchal cultures.101
What is, then, a narrative climax? In his study of ‘narrative tension’, Raphaël
Baroni says that ‘knot (noeud) and dénouement’ are essential to the very notion of plot
(mise en intrigue) in literature, drama, and cinema’, since they ‘structure the narrative
through the plotting of events, as stages of an interpretive path that corresponds to the

98
Reich, The Function of Orgasm, 286.
99
Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1979), 26; quoted in
McClary, Feminine Endings, 126.
100
Teresa de Lauretis, Alice doesn’t. Feminism, semiotics, cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1984), 108.
101
McClary, Feminine Endings, 126.

26
development of a tension.’102 This view, which Baroni inherits from narratologists like
Vladimir Propp and A. J. Greimas, actually goes back to Aristotle, who said in the
Poetics that a plot should have ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end’, and also, that its
‘denouement’ [lusis] should be ‘the result of the plot itself’103, i.e. rather than of the
events it represents. The fact that humans can take pleasure in knowing these last
through mimesis is a decisive aspect of the Aristotelian ‘paradox of tragedy’, which
makes of catharsis the result of stories that end with disaster and death104.
In contemporary literature, a typical dénouement is the finding of the killer in a
thriller as the result of an ‘interpretive path’ followed by both the detective of the story
and the reader. Other typical cases might be, in epic or dramatic narrative, knowing
who the victor and the loser of a battle are, or whether the hero manages to win his
‘spiritual struggle’ at the end of the story. This narrative dénouement is always a
cognitive event, in the sense that it results from new information about the plot, like
discovering the killer’s identity or the hero’s fate.
Many musical climaxes are undisputedly linked to cognitive events of this kind.
As much is implied in Mahler’s comment on false and true conclusions, where the
musical climax itself brings news of the hero’s ‘victory’, and the same is true, in a still
more explicit way, of d’Indy’s final apotheosis. Most programme music and operatic
scenes operate on similar premises. Eero Tarasti’s narratological perspective, based on
the theories of A. J. Greimas, also suggests narrative dénouements that do not depend
on verbal elements, for instance when in Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasie op. 61 the struggle
between the musical themes reaches a point (b. 262) where ‘the true identity’ of a theme
that until then had a subordinated, negative function, is finally ‘revealed’.105 Meyer’s
syntactical climaxes like, say, the recapitulation in a sonata form, also have a crucial
cognitive element, namely the recognition of the exposition’s material. In a similar
vein, Baroni makes a case for instrumental music being an ‘abstract’ version of
narrative, where ‘the pleasure one can take from it depends of the more or less tortuous

102
Raphaël Baroni, La tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité et surprise (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 40-41: ‘…noeud
et dénouement, qui structurent le récit à travers la mise en intrigue des événements, sont avant tout
des étapes dans le cheminement interprétatif, qui se définissent en rapport avec le développement
d’une tension.’
103
Artistotle, Poetics 1454a. See Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit. 2. La configuration dans le récit de fiction
(Paris: Seuil, 1984), 67-77.
104
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’expérience esthétique (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), 164-176.
105
Eero Tarasti, ‘Pour une musicologie de Chopin’. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of
Music, 15/1 (1984), 72: ‘…la véritable identité de ce thème qui a fonctionné comme négactant est
révélée.’

27
ways that lead to the final dénouement’106. In such approaches, narrativity as such,
independently of any specific semiotic medium, appears as the key to aesthetic
climax.107
At the receptor’s level, Baroni associates the noeud/dénouement pair with a
succession of inner states of tension and harmony, a ‘dysphoric imbalance’ followed
by a ‘euphoric rebalance’.108 And he suggests that this can have a libidinal basis,
namely the ‘scopic drive’, described by Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du texte: ‘All the
excitement lies in the hope of seeing the sex (the high school boy’s dream) or of
knowing the end of the story (the satisfaction of fiction).’109 Even if he doesn’t speak
here of sublimation, Barthes is drawing from Freud and Lacan to propose his famous
distinction between spoken plaisir and unspeakable jouissance. This structuralist
reading of Freud was inspirational for Robert Scholes and other American
narratologists like Peter Brooks, whose ideas were integrated, together with the
critique of their male bias, into feminist theories.
Now the reading of Freud can take one in different directions. In 1977, Brooks
derived what he called ‘Freud’s masterplot’ from ‘Beyond the Pleasure principle’
(1920), the article that introduced the notion that Eros and Thanatos (rather than libido
opposed to the reality principle) are at work in every human being. ‘The aim of all life
is death’, writes Freud. Brooks comments: ‘plot mediates meanings with the
contradictory human world of the eternal and the mortal’.110 The view of death as the
organizer of narrativity connects with Aristotle and the unhappy endings of ancient
tragedy, yet does not rule out sexual pleasure. On the contrary: if ‘desire is the wish
for the end’, writes Brooks, ‘the story of Scheherazade is doubtless the story of
stories’.111 And since music cannot go on for a thousand nights, a musical ending
should ‘represent its own finitude’, as Federico Monjeau puts it.112 The notion that
orgasms have a connection with death, frequent in madrigals by Dowland or

106
Raphaël Baroni, ‘Tensions et résolutions : musicalité de l’intrigue ou intrigue musicale ?’, Cahiers de
narratologie 21 (2011), 15-17.
107
H. Porter Abbott, ‘Narrativity’, Handbook of Narratology 2nd ed. Vol. 2, Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph
Meister, John Pier, Wolf Schmid (Eds.) (Berlin/Boston : De Gruyter, 2014), 587-608.
108
Baroni, La tension narrative, 133. ‘déséquilibrage dysphorique’ / ‘rééquilibrage euphorique’.
109
Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 20; quoted in Baroni, La tension narrative, 260:
‘Toute l’excitation se réfugie dans l’espoir de voir le sexe (rêve de collégien) ou de connaître la fin de
l’histoire (satisfaction romanesque).’
110
Peter Brooks, ‘Freud’s Masterplot’, Yale French Studies 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The
Question of Reading: Otherwise (1977), 280-300, at 300.
111
Brooks, ‘Freud’s Masterplot’, 299.
112
Federico Monjeau, Un viaje en círculos. Sobre óperas, cuartetos y finales (Buenos Aires: Mardulce, 2018),
chap. 9.

28
Monteverdi, can be likened to Georges Bataille’s description of masculine orgasm as
the petite mort.113
There is a limit, though, to narrativity as a key to both musical and sexual
pleasure. In music not all climaxes are cognitive events, and what makes them
climaxes is not their role in a plot but their phenomenological shape; in this, they are
different from literary climaxes, whose experienced tempo and duration vary from
reader to reader. Also, from a psychoanalytical perspective the actual temporality of
the sexual act does not mirror that of sexual desire in general, whose phenomenology
tends to merge in the opaque experience of the unconscious. Adding to that, both
music and sex often rely on non-conceptual representations, whose experience is not
reducible to attributing them a role in a plot. Of course, this is not to deny that sex
involves a cognitive dimension, one that is intimately linked to affects and pleasure.
Richard Shusterman has convincingly argued, against a dominant tradition in
aesthetics, for sexual experience to be a kind of aesthetic experience, at least in some
situations.114 For Jean-Marie Schaeffer, aesthetic experience definitely involves a
cognitive dimension, concentrated in the notion of aesthetic attention.115 At a much
simpler level, sex involves cognition because each partner perceives the bodily
presence of the other whose physical attributes and behaviour are indeed a crucial
source of pleasure. And even solitary sex is, more often than not, mediated by sensorial
stimulation, as witnessed by the pornography industry. This does not imply that
orgasm itself is a cognitive experience, though.
What, after all, is an orgasm? It is not enough to think of it as an ‘explosive
discharge of neuromuscular tensions’, as suggested in the famous Kinsey reports.116
The question has been raised by philosophers Ned Block and Michael Tye as a case
test for their dispute around ‘representationalism’, i.e. whether the phenomenal
character of conscious experience is only that of representational contents, or whether
there are also ‘qualitative properties of conscious experience’, or qualia.117 According
to Block, on the one hand, ‘there are features of the experience of orgasm that don’t
represent anything’, since ‘orgasm is phenomenally impressive and there is nothing
very impressive about the representational content that there is an orgasm’.118According

113
Georges Bataille, Les larmes d’Eros (Paris : Pauvert, 2001).
114
Richard Shusterman, ‘Aesthetic Experience: from Analysis to Eros’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 64/2 (Spring 2006), 217-229.
115
Schaeffer, L’expérience esthétique, chap. 2.
116
Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the
Human Female (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1953), 627.
117
Ned Block, ‘Mental Paint and Mental Latex’. Philosophical Issues 7, Perception (1996), 19-49.
118
Ibid., 34.

29
to Nye, on the other hand, ‘orgasms are, at heart, bodily sensations. Like other bodily
sensations, under optimal conditions (conditions of well functioning), they “track”
bodily states, just as perceptual sensations “track” environmental states.’119
Consequently, an orgasm is either a non-representational impression or a non-
conceptual representation of one’s own body. And this is so even if mental images,
among many other things, play a key role in erotic excitement as part of ‘a piece of
theater whose story seems genuine because of the truth of the body’s sensations’, as
Robert Stoller puts it.120 Having an orgasm is not being aroused, or enchanted, or
touched, by a partner, even if all that can definitely trigger it. ‘I can have an experience
whose representational content is that my partner is having a very pleasing experience
down there that changes in intensity’, says Block; ‘and although that may be
pleasurable for me, it is not pleasurable in the phenomenally impressive way that
graces my own orgasms. I vastly prefer my own orgasms to those of others.’121 It
follows that there is no such a thing as a shared orgasm even if partners reach climax
at the same time, which can of course very much contribute to the intensity of their
experience.
This brings to the fore an essential difference between Patty’s graph of musical
intensity curve and Reich’s graph of orgasm, namely that the first depicts an object of
perception, whereas the second depicts an inner experience. Musical climaxes and real
orgasms are but two different examples of the many temporal shapes that can be
represented through an intensity curve of tension and energy. This is why the orgasm
metaphor can apply to very different things, from winning chess games to hearing
washing machines, 122 as long as they are sources of pleasure. And, of course, this is
independent from the presence of the word orgasm itself. Annegret Fauser explains
how Parisian musical critics, both excited and embarrassed by Massenet’s erotic
interlude in act II of Esclarmonde (1889), struggled to ‘control the music’s excessively
direct impact by looking for verbal equivalents’.123 Only in the 1920s the word ‘orgasm’
started to migrate from sexology and psychiatry to the current vocabulary of sexual

119
Michael Tye, ‘Orgasms Again’. Philosophical Issues 7, Perception (1996), 51-54 at 54.
120
Robert Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), viii. See
also Steven Epstein, ‘Sexuality and identity: The contribution of object relations theory to a
constructionist sociology’, Theory and Society 20 (1991), 825-873.
121
Block, ‘Mental Paint and Mental Latex’, 33.
122
Bernard Suits, ‘Games and Paradox’, Philosophy of Science Vol. 36, No. 3 (Sep., 1969), 316-321.
123
Annegret Fauser, ‘L’élément érotique dans l’œuvre de Massenet’, Massenet en son temps, Actes du
colloque organisé en 1992 à l’occasion du deuxième Festival Massenet (Saint-Etienne: Association du festival
Massenet/L’Esplanade Saint-Etienne Opéra, 1999), 156-179 at 169.

30
pleasure;124 in French legal sources, it does not appear before 1940.125 Yet the
plausibility of considering any phenomenon, including musical climaxes, as a
representation of the sexual act strongly increases with the presence of other analogies
than just similar intensity curves. Indeed, the lack of other analogical parameters
might help explain why McClary’s ‘metaphorical ejaculations’ often appear as
idiosyncratic interpretations, rather than being accounted for in reception materials.
What other analogies, then, play a role in a musical climax that can be heard as
an orgasm? One of the most basic features of the sexual act, in all historical contexts,
is the strong rhythmic dimension of the interaction of the bodies. Accelerating and
slowing down, introducing segmentations with or without transitions, keeping a
steady pulsation while varying other intensities – all of these are facets of the complex
game of pace, power and pleasure that couples play during sexual intercourse.
According to psychologist Adam Safron, for evolutionary reasons ‘human sexual
performance depends on being capable of not only switching between multiple
rhythms, but of inferring the best times for these changes.’126 ‘Slowly the pelvis
begins to swing, like the free swinging of a dangling leg. As the pelvic movements in
both partners take on this free-swinging quality, the tempo of the movement
increases’, says an Encyclopaedia of Sexual Behavior; the passage rings like a musical
description of dance.127 Such rhythmical and temporal patterns have a bodily basis that
can be measured through scientific means: Williams Masters and Virginia Johnson
found that during orgasm the initial contractions of the penis happen at the same
average interval as those of the vagina, namely 0.8 seconds.128 But they also have a
strong subjective component, as when an ‘experience of inevitability’ marks for the
man the instant when he ceases to control ejaculation; also, feminine orgasm
reportedly begins with ‘a feeling of suspension’.129
All this is a consequence of human biology, which nevertheless does not
prevent strong cultural modulations in time and space. The duration of foreplay and

124
Anne-Claire Rebreyend, ‘Sur les traces des pratiques sexuelles des individus ‘ordinaires’. France
1920-1970’, Le Mouvement Social 207/2 (2004), 57-74; Dominique Cardon, ‘Droit au plaisir et devoir
d’orgasme dans l’émission de Ménie Grégoire’, Le Temps des médias, vol.1 n°1 (2003), 77-94.
125
Anne-Marie Sohn, Du premier baiser à l’alcôve. La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950) (Paris:
Aubier, 1996), chap. 1.
126
Adam Safron, ‘What is orgasm? A model of sexual trance and climax via rhythmic entrainment’,
Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology (2016), 1-17.
127
Alexander Lowen, ‘Movements and feeling in sex’, The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior, Albert Ellis
and Albert Abarbanel (eds.). (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1961), 740.
128
William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Toronto and NewYork,1966;
repr. Boston, 1980), 128, 185.
129
Ibid. 134, 214.

31
intercourse depends on cultural sexual scripts that orient the individual’s desires and
practices, at the price of frequent misperceptions and discordances.130 Nowadays, in
Western countries, the coordination of movements and gestures is often supposed to
maximize the pleasure of both partners, at least as a normative ideal whose ultimate
expression is heterosexual simultaneous orgasm. Things were probably a little bit
different in Debussy’s time, especially since women’s pleasure was generally less
important for men. For sure, instructions on how to ‘build her stage-by-stage towards
the best orgasm of her life’, now current in men’s magazines, were not to be found in
the press he read.131 Yet the temporal coordination of bodies and affects was, and is, a
necessary aspect of any sexual encounter.
I suggest that a piece of music is more likely to represent and/or induce a sex
experience when its pacing scenarios, and not only its intensity curve, have an analogic
relation with those of sex. According to Safron, ‘music and dance may be the only
things that come close to sexual interaction in their power to entrain neural rhythms
and produce sensory absorption and trance.’132 This might be a fundamental reason
for dance’s close association with seduction and sex. It happens through what
cognitivists call ‘cross-domain mapping’, i.e. the capacity to establish analogies
between separated areas of experience, a mechanism that according to Lawrence
Zbikowski, is crucial for musical emotions and dance.133 Musical works that explicitly
evoke sexual content, like bacchanals in Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1877) or Ravel’s
Daphnis et Chloé (1912), characteristically display strong rhythmic activity. Also,
Ravel’s Boléro illustrates the idea as a metronome of desire: a musical climax is more
likely to be heard as a musical orgasm when it articulates a climactic intensity curve
and a rhythmic pattern that resemble the pacing scenarios of real sexual acts.
The perception by a listener of such a temporal sonic shape under certain
contextual conditions allows her to recognize it as an orgasm, although there is a long
way to experiencing it as such. Indeed, the chances of somebody actually having an
orgasm just by listening to a musical orgasm are quite low. This doesn’t mean that the
listening experience never includes sexual arousal. The pleasure of perceiving a
musical climax might have something in common with that of perceiving a partner’s

130
S. Andrea Miller and E. Sandra Byers, ‘Actual and Desired Duration of Foreplay and Intercourse:
Discordance and Misperceptions within Heterosexual Couples’, The Journal of Sex Research 41/3 (Aug.,
2004), 301-309.
131
Men’s Health, quoted in Frith, Orgasmic Bodies, 94.
132
Safron, ‘What is orgasm?’, 5.
133
Lawrence Zbikowski, ‘Music, emotion, analysis’, Music Analysis, 29/i-ii-iii (2011); id., ‘Ways of
knowing. Social dance, music, and grounded cognition’, Music-Dance. Sound and Motion in
Contemporary Discourse, Patrizia Veroli and Gianfranco Vinay (eds.) (London: Routledge, 2018), 57-75.

32
orgasm, while differing from it at an ethical level, since the latter is part of an
intersubjective encounter while the former is not. Psychologists John Sloboda and Jaak
Panksepp mention sexual arousal as a quite frequent effect of music in their
experimental studies of ‘chills’ and the listening experience134. And even if no reception
studies seem to exist, some level of arousal is a likely reaction to ‘aural sex’ pieces, like
pop music songs that include female vocalizations like Donna Summer’s ‘pornosonic
confession’ in Love to love you baby,135 to say nothing of unedited recordings of actual
orgasms. Also, in an article on music and ‘erotic agency’, Tia DeNora has reported
cases of heterosexual men proposing to her female partners to adapt the timing of the
sexual act to classical music works, including Ravel’s Boléro, eliciting negative
reactions in the women.136 This empirical result is similar to a fictional scene in J.M.
Coetzee’s novel Summertime, depicting a woman outraged by the protagonist’s
proposal to make love to the adagio of Schubert’s C Major Quintet, a thirteen-minute
piece with no apparent ‘musical orgasm’.137
All this suggests a historically strong masculine bias. It also confirms the
pertinence, under certain contextual conditions, of describing some music climaxes as
‘musical orgasms’, even if masculine. But what about feminine orgasms? How can they
be musically represented? The most famous orgasm in music history is probably that
of a woman, Isolde, at the end of Richard Wagner’s Liebestod. But this is a male
composer’s representation of female jouissance, one in which the petite mort is
monumentalized into a grande mort. And in that respect things are not very different
in avant-garde works such as Erwin Schulhoff’s Sonata erotica (1919), even though this
Dadaist piece, where a female singer performs a realistic orgasm fully written into
score, actually represents a critique of Wagnerian pathos by its mere existence. In
pornography and popular culture, ‘the vocal ejaculations of climaxing women are a
prominent, perhaps the prominent, feature of representations of female sexual
pleasure’.138 But it is harder to identify musical representations of the inner experience
of women akin to the masculine intensity curve. The non-normative status of feminine

134
John Sloboda, ‘Music structure and emotional response: Some empirical findings’, Psychology of
Music 19 (1991), 110-120 at 112; Jaak Panksepp, ‘The Emotional Sources of ‘Chills’ Induced by Music’,
Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter, 1995), 171-207 at 178.
135
Susana Loza, ‘Sampling (Hetero)Sexuality: Diva-Ness and Discipline in Electronic Dance Music’,
Popular Music, Vol. 20, No. 3, Gender and Sexuality (Oct. 2001), 349-357 at 351; John Corbett and Terri
Kapsalis, ‘Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound’, TDR (1988-) Vol. 40, No. 3, Experimental
Sound & Radio (Autumn, 1996), 102-111.
136
Tia DeNora, ‘Music and Erotic Agency. Sonic Resources and Socio-Sexual Action’, Music & Body
3/2 (1997), 43-65 at 58.
137
J.M. Coetzee, Summertime. Scenes from provincial life (London: Vintage Books, 2010), 68.
138
Corbett and Kapsalis, ‘Aural Sex’, 103.

33
orgasm precludes standardized sonic representations, other than real or faked
vocalizations that are themselves often modeled on men’s desire.139 McClary makes a
case for Genesis II, a piano trio by Janika Vandervelde, to contain an ‘image of female
erotic pleasure’, but she does not describe the music, nor speaks of orgasms for that
matter.140 Hanna Bosma notes that ‘the avoidance of definitive closure’ is recurrent in
works by female avant-garde composers, as well as in male-dominated avant-garde
music at large;141 Danielle Sofer mentions Alice Shields’ electronic opera Apocalypse
(1994) as staging a woman’s orgasms by leaning away from ‘binaristic notions of
gender’.142 We can leave open the question, as a topic for further research, of what
musical feminine orgasms sound like, be they composed by men or by women, when
they are truly independent of masculine models. For sure, such an inquiry should take
good notice of ‘the proposition that female orgasm is unnecessary’, as feminist literary
theorist Susan Winnett wrote in still another response to Scholes’ ‘archetype’, not
because she didn’t like orgasming but because ‘women’s pleasure can take place
outside, or independent of, the male sexual economy whose pulsations determine the
dominant culture.’143
Nevertheless, something more substantial can be said about the visual
representation of female orgasm. In 1966, Masters and Johnson proposed an
alternative to Reich’s graph and its masculine biased crescendo-and-post-coital-calm
curve.144 Their graphs include an enhanced plateau, multi-orgasmic scenarios, and
different curves of decreasing intensity (See Pl. 6).

139
Erin B. Cooper, Allan Fenigstein and Robert L. Fauber, ‘The Faking Orgasm Scale for Women:
Psychometric Properties’, Archives of Sexual Behavior 43, no 3 (1 April 2014), 423-435.
140
McClary, Feminine Endings, 124.
141
Hannah Bosma, ‘Musical Washing Machines, Composer-Performers, and Other Blurring
Boundaries: How Women Make a Difference in Electroacoustic Music’, Intersections Vol. 26 n°2, In and
Out of the Sound Studio (2006), 100. See also id., The electronic cry: Voice and gender in electroacoustic
music, Ph.D. diss., ASCA-University of Amsterdam (2013),
https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=fa216eb9-eab1-468c-98c8-0f76eb679b8a, accessed 10 June 2018.
142
Danielle Sofer, ‘Breaking Silence, Breaching Censorship: ‘‘Ongoing Interculturality’’ in Alice
Shields’s Electronic Opera Apocalypse’, American Music, 36 (2018), 135-162 at 141; and Sofer,
‘Eroticism and Time in Computer Music: Juliana Hodkinson and Niels Ronsholdt’s Fish & Fowl’,
Proceedings of the ICMC/SMC (2014), 148-53.
143
Susan Winnett, ‘Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure’, PMLA
105/3, The Politics of Critical Language (May 1990), 505-518 at 505.
144
Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response, 5.

34
 Pl. 6. Graph for female orgasm from Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response, 5

Drawn at a moment when the very nature of feminine orgasm – including

Freud’s famous and now discredited distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasms
– was an object of scientific and general debate, these graphs showed striking
differences between men and women. But Masters and Johnson also fired an endless
controversy for contrary reasons, as witnessed by sociologist Ross Morrow’s later
fierce attack on their ‘four stages model’ –excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution
– because of its ‘ideological emphasis on sexual similarity’ through an alleged
essentialization of heterosexual ‘coital imperative’.145 With these debates in mind, it
might be more adequate, rather than distinguishing sharply between masculine and
feminine orgasms, to see orgasms as a variegated set of experiences that, within the
boundaries of their biological apparatus, human beings may, or may not, have in
different forms and situations.
In fact, research tends to show no essential difference between women and
men, except – significantly – the ability of many women to experience more and longer
orgasms, and also to continue making love afterwards. A few years after the
publication of Human Sexual Response, a study by Ellen Belle Vance and Nathaniel N.
Wagner detected no gender difference in a set of ‘written descriptions of orgasm’, like
‘A buildup of tension which starts to pulsate very fast, and then there is a sudden
release from the tension and desire to sleep’; ‘Feels like tension building up until you
think it can’t build up any more, then release’; and so on. The authors concluded that
‘the experience of orgasm for males and females is essentially the same’, something

145
Ross Morrow, Sex Research and Sex Therapy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 102-8.

35
that is true in many ways, including the involved neurological mechanisms. Yet what
that 1976 study actually showed, because of its biased methodology, was only that a
panel of mostly male ‘experts’ (gynaecologists, obstetricians and medical students)
was unable to distinguish between male and female narratives of orgasms out of a
sample from which multi-orgasmic reports had been suppressed from the start.146
Transposed to music, this suggests that at a male composer was, and is, likely
to conceive the intensity curve of a female orgasm as similar to that of his own
orgasms. With all this in mind, we can resume our discussion of Debussy’s L’isle
joyeuse at the point where we left it.

Emma’s desire, Claude’s music

Let’s start by the final climax. Composing the end of L’isle joyeuse was for
Debussy a singular thing, both for musical and biographical reasons. As we have seen,
climaxes were not his topical way of concluding, like they were for Mahler or d’Indy.
Leaving aside his early production, where idiosyncratic aspects are less pronounced,
his style is better represented by ‘dissolving endings’ like that of Prélude à l’après-midi
d’un faune (1894).147 Here, the most salient climax intervenes less than half the way
through the piece (bars 44-46) whereas a calmer, syntactic climax due to ‘motivic
compression’ can be identified at bars 93-95, still more than a minute before the end.148
Needless to say, this doesn’t make of Prélude an asexual piece; indeed, partly thanks to
Nijinsky’s 1912 performance, it is one of the most eroticized pieces of all music
history.149 The three Nocturnes (1897-9) do not end with climactic closures either. And
such endings are virtually absent in emblematic piano works such as Images (1901-5),
the Préludes (1909-12)150 and En blanc et noir (1915). As Marianne Wheeldon points out,
in Debussy’s later works, musical ideas that ‘do not aim toward a climax or resolution,
but proceed with no one statement hierarchically more significant than another.’151 An

146
Ellen Belle Vance and Nathaniel N. Wagner, ‘Written descriptions of orgasm: a study of sex
differences’, Archives of Sexual Behavior 5/1 (January 1976), 87-98.
147
Arnold Whittall, ‘Tonality and the Whole-tone Scale in the Music of Debussy’, Music Review 36
(1975), 261-71 at 265.
148
Matthew Brown, ‘Tonality and Form in Debussy’s “Prélude à ‘L’Après-midi d’un faune”’. Music
Theory Spectrum 15/2 (Autumn, 1993), 137.
149
Farfan, ‘Man as Beast: Nijinsky's Faun’.
150
Of the twenty-four Préludes, only Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest and Général Lavine: eccentric end with full
climactic closure. For an analysis of the climax at two-thirds of La fille aux cheveux de lin, see Jeremy
Day-O’Connell. ‘Debussy, Pentatonicism, and the Tonal Tradition’, Music Theory Spectrum, 31/2 (Fall
2009), 225-261.
151
Marianne Wheeldon, ‘Interpreting ‘Strong Moments’ in Debussy’s “La terrasse des audiences du
clair de lune”’, Intégral 14/15 (2000/2001), 181-208, 182.

36
earlier piece like Masques (1903-4) dissolves in a kind of transition that, according to
Roy Howat, makes of it a prequel to L’isle joyeuse.152
On the other hand, Debussy’s pieces do seem to end more often with climaxes
in the years following the premiere of Pelléas: witness Estampes (1903), Rapsodie pour
saxophone (1903),153 Deux danses (1904), Ibéria (1905-8) and La Mer (1903-5). Indeed, the
final section of Dialogues du vent et de la mer, the third and last esquisse symphonique, is
one of the composer’s most grandiose orchestral moments. In later years, Jeux (1912)
displays an impressive climactic form, whose intensity curve was personally
scrutinized by Diaghilev to suit Nijinsky’s eroticized choreography.154 It is perhaps fair
to say that climactic closure, contrary to being the default norm it was for many
composers, was for Debussy but one formal strategy among others, in an astonishingly
rich palette of ways to connect his music with silence.
Now, according to François de Médicis, La Mer is full of traces of Debussy’s
encounter with Emma, starting with a series of musical allusions to Wagner’s Tristan
that he hears as cryptic love messages, and including the dedication to Emma of a
reduced manuscript score, later deleted for unknown reasons. For this author, there is
an ‘intrigue amoureuse’ in La Mer, and this work, L’isle joyeuse and Fêtes galantes, are
all ‘hommages amoureux’.155 Should we think that all the terminal climaxes Debussy
wrote in Emma’s company were born out of the same ‘libidinal economy’ as L’isle
joyeuse? In fact, De Médicis speaks of love but does not say anything about sex, leaving
us free to speculate on whether the final climax of La Mer is to be heard as a musical
orgasm. We have seen how deep Debussy’s joy of working on La Mer was during the
blissful days spent with his lover on the isle of Jersey. Simon Trezise notes, in
connection with this work, that ‘the sea has often been associated with sexuality’.156 In
Ken Russell’s film, the composer’s swimming in the Channel with his own music as
soundtrack is depicted as an almost erotic experience.
Yet, the ending of La Mer is much less likely to be heard as an orgasm than that
of L’isle joyeuse, for reasons that are not only biographical (the third sketch definitely
makes a difference at that level) but musical as well. According to Brian Hart, Dialogues
du vent et de la mer ‘alludes to the rhetorical features of a nineteenth-century symphonic

152
Howat, ‘En route for L’isle joyeuse. The Restoration of a triptych’.
153
James R. Noyes, ‘Debussy’s “Rapsodie pour orchestre et saxophone” Revisited’, The Musical
Quarterly, 90 3/4 (Fall–Winter, 2007), 416-445.
154
Robert Orledge, ‘The Genesis of Debussy’s ‘Jeux’’, The Musical Times, Vol. 128, No. 1728 (Feb., 1987),
68-73.
155
François de Médicis, ‘Tristan dans La Mer : le crépuscule wagnérien noyé dans le zénith
debussyste?’, Acta Musicologica, 79/1 (2007), 195-251 at 224-225.
156
Trezise, Debussy: La Mer, 42.

37
finale: the reprise of its principal theme leads to the dynamic and textural climax of
the composition, followed by a chorale peroration; and, unlike the preceding
movements, it ends with a firm tonic cadence’. This puts La Mer in the surprising
company of the d’indyste ‘message-symphony’, while at the same time rejecting its very
‘purpose’, namely the existence of a message.157 Whatever Debussy’s reasons for this
strategic move, in this apotheosis the salience of the chorale-like melody, traditionally
associated with political power and religious experience, is provided by dynamic and
registral factors, like loud high brass sonorities on long-sustained pitches, and also by
the slowing down, through the very salience of this melody, of the music’s rhythmic
momentum.
As suggested above, rhythmic patterns that cross the domains of music and sex
enhance the plausibility of hearing a musical climax like an orgasm. The contrast with
La Mer in that aspect contributes to L’isle joyeuse’s singular position in Debussy’s
oeuvre, often acknowledged by analysts. According to Arnold Whittall, ‘first and
foremost, it is a symphonic poem which subjects one of his finest melodies to the
increasingly orgiastic demands of the “programme”’. Whittall does not say to what
‘programme’ he is alluding, but the connection with Emma was surely in his mind, the
keyword here being ‘orgiastic’. ‘That he was capable of driving a structure forwards
to end at the moment of maximum tension –he continues- is clear from for example,
Act IV of Pelléas et Mélisande, but L’isle joyeuse is a strikingly single-minded example of
such a cumulative design and the musical language is powerfully consistent’.158 Roy
Howat stresses the singularity of what he calls an ‘exuberant dynamic shape’:
‘beginning pianissimo on two notes a tone apart, and in an undefined rhythm and
tonality, it finishes in A major splendour, triple-forte, the last two bars spanning
virtually the entire keyboard and completing a coda of rhythmic vigour unsurpassed
in Debussy’s output’.159
This invites one to explore the affordances of the music for sexual metaphors.
But let’s stress first that this is very different from claiming that of whether any passage
of Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse ‘is’ a musical orgasm, and also from saying that Debussy
wanted it to be heard in that way. Rather, the articulation of biographical context and
musical form makes it plausible to hear orgasms in the third sketch as well as in the

157
Brian Hart, ‘The Symphony in Debussy’s World: A Context for His Views on the Genre and Early
Interpretations of La Mer’, Debussy and His World, Jane Fulcher (ed.). (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 181-202, 193-194.
158
Whittall, ‘Tonality and the Whole-tone Scale’, 265-266.
159
Howat, Debussy in proportion, 46.

38
final section of L’isle joyeuse – at least as plausible as other interpretations such as the
Voyage to Cythère (which is far from contradicting it), a Pantheist celebration of Nature,
or a Deleuzian ‘territorial assemblage’. In other words, both the C major climax and
the final A major climax can be verbally represented as musical representations of
orgasms on a stronger basis that an occasional poetic metaphor. Indeed, these
affordances, and those of L’isle joyeuse as a whole, invite us to hear the entire piece as
a sexual narrative. And even if the music does not resemble a dialogue between a
feminine and a masculine ‘voice’, its most likely reference, given the dominant view
of art as expression of the artist, and provided that the biographical information is
available to the listener, is no other than the relationship of Emma Bardac and Claude
Debussy.
Evidence of the plausibility of sexual associations is to be found in the eroticized
descriptions that regularly appear in its reception history. An early one, saturated with
disclaimers about ‘innocence’, is Louis Laloy’s picturing in 1906 a ‘Garden of Eden’
full of nude dancing fauns and nymphs.160 In 1914, Debussy associates it with
Watteau’s L’embarquement pour Cythère (1717), and its couples paying tribute to
Aphrodite on an island of pleasures.161 In 1929, music critic Pierre Lagarde speaks of
its ‘oriental langueur’.162 In 1932, the reference to Watteau appears in a book by Alfred
Cortot: ‘L’isle joyeuse sets the trap of its laughter and easy pleasures to the reckless
lovers, whose light boats approach its happy coasts under the approving gaze of
Watteau, Verlaine, and Chabrier, all necessarily evoked by the sensuous curve of this
music.’163 In 1980, Harry Halbreich explains that this piece ‘is the solar euphoria close
to the shining sea, the expanding pride of virile affirmation, the joy of the lovers who
at last have left aside their masks.’164 Paul Roberts says that ‘L’isle joyeuse is unique in
the open-air quality of its extroversion, the sustained intensity of its final climax, and
its offer of a fulfilment that is supremely achieved’, while speaking of ‘Bacchic ecstasy,
or the love-rites of an intoxicated Dionysus’.165 François-René Tranchefort writes that
the piece ‘joyfully mirrors the solar triumph of the love of Claude and Emma

160
Louis Laloy, ‘Paroles sur Claude Debussy’, Le Mercure musical, 1 January 1906, 197.
161
Klein, ‘Debussy’s L’isle Joyeuse’, 29-31.
162
Pierre Lagarde, ‘Claude Debussy par M. Pierre Lortat’, Comoedia, 10 March 1929.
163
Alfred Cortot, La musique française de piano (Paris: PUF, 1932), 26. ‘L’isle joyeuse tend le piège de ses
rires et de ses plaisirs faciles à l’insouciance des amants dans les barques légères vont accoster ses
rives fortunes, sous les regards bienveillants de Watteau, de Verlaine et de Chabrier auxquels force à
penser la courbe sensuelle de cette musique.’
164
Harry Halbreich, ‘Analyse de l’œuvre’, in Lockspeiser, Claude Debussy, 568-569. ‘…c’est l’euphorie
solaire face à la mer resplendissante, c’est la fierté épanouie de l’affirmation virile, c’est la joie des
amants enfin débarrassés de leurs masques.’
165
Roberts, Images, 111-112.

39
Bardac.’166 Whittall’s ‘orgy’ and Howat’s ‘vigour’ also belong to that bouquet of sexual
metaphors, together with Klein’s ‘sexual energy’. Other reception materials could be
added. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find a comment by a woman.
How does the music afford this proliferation of sexual images? Even if analysts
have tried to describe its form with classical schemes, they all point out how far the
piece is from following them, so we can leave them aside altogether, and favor rather
a ‘processual approach’.167 To understand L’isle joyeuse’s potential for sexual
associations, Howat’s suggestion to hear a ‘sequence of dynamic waves’ that ‘lead
cumulatively to the coda’ seems promising, in the light of what we have seen above of
human sexual performance as ‘switching between multiple rhythms’ and ‘inferring
the best times for these changes’. Throughout the piece, adds Howat, the sequence of
waves, where he identifies five ‘peaks’, is achieved ‘by preventing too firm a sense of
arrival at any stage before’.168 Emma’s C major cadence, a moment of twice pulsating
ecstasy in a relatively distant tonality, is still, nearly halfway through the piece, the
firmest moment of arrival before the final A major cadence.
Thus, both climaxes are structurally related as complementary poles: one is
open-ended, the other is the end itself; one evokes the intensity curve of a feminine
orgasm, the other, that of a masculine orgasm; one was ‘dictated’ by Emma, the other
was probably part of the first manuscript, written by Claude before encountering her.
This pattern can fit several pieces of sonic theater: one in which a woman’s orgasm is
followed by a man’s orgasm, one in which a woman climaxes first and both partners
climax together at the end, one in which the music reaches an orgasm that has no
gender specifications, and still others perhaps. But even for listeners unaware of, or
indifferent to, anthropomorphic scripts, the C major climax and the A major climax
organize the temporality of L’isle joyeuse –a piece of music of circa 6 minutes’ length in
performance- as a long-range quest for culminating pleasure. The global intensity
curve can be visualized in a spectrogram (see Pl. 7).

166
François-René Tranchefort, Guide de la musique de piano et de clavecin (Paris: Fayard, 1987). ‘…reflète
la joie du triomphe solaire de l’amour de Claude et d’Emma Bardac.’
167
Charles M. H. Keil, ‘Motion and Feeling through Music’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
Vol. 24, No. 3 (Spring, 1966), 337-349.
168
Howat, Debussy in Proportion, 55 and 47-48.

40
 Pl. 7. Spectrogram of L’isle joyeuse, after the 1961 recording by Magda Tagliaferro
(the arrows indicate the C major and A major climaxes). Courtesy of Simon Garrette

The quest starts at the beginning, with the first C# trill motif played without
accompaniment, quasi una cadenza. It is a singular sound object, a long blurred sound
in temps lisse with a fast suffix on a whole-tone collection, a pulsating explosion of
frequencies, successively heard on the same notes at different octaves (see Ex. 1).

Ex. 1. Debussy, L’isle joyeuse, bb. 1-2

At bar 1 with no beat, at bar 52 with strong ternary accents, at bar 244 as pleasure
unchained, the C# trill motif is throughout the piece a perceptual anchor in the midst
of fast-flowing events, whose rhythmical patterns and thematic elaborations frame the
complex interaction of diatonic, acoustic and whole-tone materials, well described in
the literature. The thematic thread is dominated by the C# trill motif and by two main
themes, plus several other ideas. The first main theme, theme X, is in fast binary
rhythm, and associates a dotted motif and a triplet motif (see Ex. 2).

41
Ex. 2. Theme X and habanera motif, Debussy, L’isle joyeuse, bb. 8-9

Early in the piece, as a bridge between the C# trill and theme X, the bass plays
five times, in guitar-like arpeggios, a motif of habanera. It is as though the music were
setting a social scene of desire through a dance of Hispanic resonances. In Debussy’s
music, the habanera also sounds that same year in La soirée dans Grenade, a piano piece
from Estampes (1903), and later in the prelude La puerta del vino (1911-12). In L’isle
joyeuse, it is a sensual and tactful invitation to dance, an ephemeral dramaturgy of
bodily sensations that returns with the C# trill at bars 64-66 – almost like a tango, soon
to become new danse à la mode in Paris.
The thread of desire in L’isle joyeuse includes several other dance-like motifs,
some of them binary, like the habanera, some ternary, like the ghost of a waltz entering
the stage, again in the left hand, at the first change to 3/8 meter at bar 28 (see Ex. 3).

Ex. 3. Debussy, L’isle joyeuse, bb. 28-31

The dance motifs never persist more than a few bars, for L’isle joyeuse is not
dance music. And yet they bring muscular memories of bodily movements that ignite
social memories of seduction and desire, infusing with them the very texture of the
music, even when they are not directly heard. Their desiring thread enriches the
concatenation of local intensity curves in the overall temporal process. Let us move

42
together. And that movement includes the pianist’s, the performer whose historical
role has had to be left aside in this article, but whose own mind, body and desire are
definitely part of this story.
Now the music refuses too simple an opposition between binary and ternary
rhythms, between habanera and waltz, these fleeting shadows of desiring bodies.
Rather, in Boulez’s vocabulary, the piece is an exploration of evolving temps strié,
whose Other is the temps lisse of the C# trill. Ternary rhythm insists in the second main
theme of the piece, theme Y, first heard as an ascending chord melody on the A major
acoustic scale, ondoyant et expressif. But the accompaniment plays now quintuplets, as
if escaping metrical constraints (see Ex. 4).

Ex. 4. Theme Y, Debussy, L’isle joyeuse, bb. 67-72

Another waltz-like motif does appear in the left-hand accompaniment of the

bars 109-114, an E major - C major sequence of fast ascending and descending
arpeggios that prepares the introduction of Emma’s theme and the whole third sketch
passage, already analysed as a separate entity. The dramaturgical strength of Emma’s
theme, in the bass and en dehors, builds on the fact that, for all its novelty, it is actually
a variant of theme Y transposed to the whole-tone scale and rhythmically transformed
by its rubato-like quality. Emma’s climax is both self-contained and fully integrated
into the flow of the music. Let us take its euphoric open-ended arrival in C major as a
milestone for the joys still to come.
The climax emerges from theme X now in C major, whose triplet suffix gains
autonomy through a motoric quality, sempre crescendo in an obstinate search for a high
pitch. Upward ho! In this piece, the ascending movement keeps starting over and over,
and the resolution of each wave is never the same twice. We can compare the C major
climax to the following peak of tension at bars 158-9: again, two bars of suspended
melody and fast rhythmic activity; but this time it’s a blurred low-pitch sonority and

43
a collapsing motif that, by disrupting the texture, prepares an anti-climactic arrival in
A major. Indeed, it is no peak at all, since the music suddenly tumbles down (see Ex.
5).
Ex. 5. Debussy, L’isle joyeuse, bb.156-9

Theme X resumes its motoric course, this time in its A major original tonality
and register. The arrival on the tonic at bar 160 provides no release of tension; on the
contrary, it triggers a speeding up of tempo, plus animé, and a reinforcement of the
pulsation. By now, the original dancing flavour of the theme has mutated into a
vertiginous binary rhythm: urgency is enthusiasm. Tension grows by whole-tone steps
every two bars, as if following in augmentation the path of Emma’s theme, a
hypermetrical beat that suddenly accelerates to reach a new peak on D# at bar 182 (see
Ex. 6). It is, once again, different from the previous ones, for the disruption of the
texture occurs through a new descending motif, repeated no fewer than twelve times
in various registers: a high-pitched ultrafast quintuplet on the acoustic scale, actually
less a melodic gesture than a sound object on its own rights. Down, down we go, and
still this time, there is no rest.

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Ex. 6. Debussy, L’isle joyeuse, bb.181-7

This is where the final section begins, with a sudden change of bodily position
at bar 186 pianissimo subito: from nothing, as it were - a pulsating nothing, though, with
its low ostinato G#. This binary rhythm in quavers, marked by a grace note, frames
the return of the dotted motif of theme X; it evolves on a steady pulse towards higher
registers and louder dynamics, by steps of fourths and thirds in phrases spanning
three crotchets. At bar 200, the dotted motif reaches G and becomes a fanfare in E flat
major, always on the same steady, strenuous pace. Its percussive joy alternates with
the triplet motif of theme X, and at bar 208 reaches A in F major. The pulse in crotchets
reigns throughout the passage. It does so in spite of the ternary hemiola in the medium
register at bars 212-15, turning into a trumpeting high A at bar 216-17. It does so
through the triplets becoming semiquavers at bar 218. This high A announces the
grandiose A major return of theme Y at bar 220, ff, très en dehors – and at the same time
un peu cédé, since here deceleration, rather than acceleration, contributes to building
climactic tension.169
From this point on, with the restatement of theme Y, some analysts speak of a
coda, but there is no strong reason for that, since all classical schemes have been
abandoned. Still, we are close to the end of a temporal process, one that started at the
beginning of the piece in temps lisse with the C# trill, danced a dreamed habanera in A
major, grew through waltzing territories of temps strié up to the return of the trill,
reached Emma’s C major climax, sank with the pianissimo ostinato in G# at bar 186,

169
Patty, ‘Pacing Scenarios’, 229-230.

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and grew again steadily to rhythmical and melodic apotheosis in A major. The journey
on the island has been joyful, and now we’re heading towards a destination. The 3/8
downbeat is the very pulsation of pleasure, still enhanced by its contradiction with the
accentuated second upbeat. Pleasure of repetition, pleasure of acceleration through
diminution: the wide and euphoric theme Y in A major persists twice in its eight-bars
form, and then twice in its four-bars form, still building tension by reaching a high C
at bar 242.
The final ladder of Debussy’s ode to joy starts at bar 244, when the C# trill motif
espouses the ternary rhythm of theme Y (see Ex. 7).
Ex. 7. Debussy, L’isle joyeuse, bb. 241-55

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Its suffix is prolonged through still increased tempo (très animé jusqu’à la fin) and
dynamics (ff, then fff). Against this ternary rhythm, enhanced by intensity, at bar 248
the polyrhythmic doubling of C# in medium-register hemiolas keeps the fast pace
going, and still changing. The pulse holds over the boundless prolongation of the
whole-tone collection, with its subversive harmony in full blossom. What a feeling of
suspension, what a feeling of inevitability. And then time gets definitely out of joint.
Klein was right, after all. The music can come; it does come. The threshold of orgasm
unleashes a gigantic trill in triple fortissimo on the vertical traces of the acoustic scale
(A/E/D#), that resolves in a fast and high-pitched diatonic cadence on A major, then
tumbles down across the keyboard to final exhaustion in the bass. In the score, the rest
of the last bar is silence.
It is worth nothing, as a conclusion, that traces of Emma’s theme, defined as a
complete ascending whole-tone scale followed by a major third
(F/G/A/B/C#/D#/G), are present in the final sections of the piece, and not only in
the ‘dictated’ part. The same notes, transposed two octaves higher, are like milestones
in the broad ascending curves that lead to the final climax. This happens first at bars
176-81, when the motoric triplet ascends steadily by one whole-tone step every two
bars, then accelerates before reaching the peak that launches the collapse of the
descending quintuplets. It happens again from bar 198 onwards, where F is
melodically salient, as a diminished fifth of B major; then we have G, at bar 200; A, at
bar 208; B, at bar 220, with the return of theme Y; C#, with the trill motif at bar 244,
which brings along D#; and finally G at bar 245, the highest pitch before the final A.
Sources do not tell whether this construction of the finale was part of the
revision that followed the sojourn on the isle of Jersey, or if the last sections already
had this shape in the first draft. In the other two sketches, both dating from earlier
stages of the creative process, most of the thematic materials of the piece are outlined
with different levels of precision and development; yet, there is no trace of Emma’s
theme. But from a different perspective, its pitch collection was already part of the
very first idea for the piece, namely the C# trill, written down at the beginning of the
first sketch. In bar 1 of the score, the suffix of the trill on C#/D# completes the whole-
tone collection by going downwards B, A, and G, with C, Bb and Ab as chromatic
passing steps, and upwards G, F, and G again. The ‘dictation’ by Emma gave a
distinctive shape to pitches that, differently ordered, were there from the very start of
L’isle joyeuse. This leaves room for two possibilities: either the invention of ‘Emma’s
theme’ in June 1904 led the composer to revise the whole finale in order to make of it

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the very drive of the last climactic sections; or, the other way around, the theme and
its elaboration as a local climax in bars 117-44 is a condensation of the melodic edge of
the final sections, which is in turn a reordering of the pitch collection of the initial motif
of the piece. In both cases, Emma’s desire, of which the theme is a symbol, plays a key
role in the structuring of L’isle joyeuse.

Esteban Buch
CRAL / EHESS

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